


Til Planet-Rise

by Euphorion



Category: Fantastic Four (Comicverse), Spider-Man (Comicverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M, Masturbation, Politics, alcohol use, almost blowjobs, capes, fancy parties, implied sith Doom, past Johnny/Lyja, sorta - Freeform, sue is a senator, this is MAYBE one of three but don't hold me to it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 00:12:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16712749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euphorion/pseuds/Euphorion
Summary: “This is the part where it gets a little more complicated,” Fel'icia said, “so listen up.”Peter blinked and looked back at the data pad.“We’re not the only ones looking to get our hands on this weapon,” Fel'icia said. “There’s a terrorist group out of Denusia who got the jump on us and already contacted one of the scientists involved, a Dr. Reed Richards. Richards got cold feet about the whole ‘create a super weapon for a would-be tyrant’ thing, and he’s hatched a plot to steal the prototype when it’s unveiled at the gala. Richards will be attending with his partner and presumably co-conspirator, Senator Susan Storm of Alderaan. While at the Gala, Richards will hand off the prototype to the person attending the party with the Senator’s younger brother, Jonathan. The Denusian terrorists plan for that person to be one of their number, a smuggler named Robert Drake.”Fel'icia arched an eyebrow. “We plan for that person to be you.”





	Til Planet-Rise

**Author's Note:**

> This is perhaps the most self-indulgent thing I have ever written in my life so thank you for reading it!!
> 
> I have been blessed with not one but two artists!! portwinestains on tumblr drew me some [absolutely lovely scenes](http://portwinestains.tumblr.com/post/180402168113/had-the-pleasure-of-drawing-for) and got Peter's smitten-despite-himself look down PERFECTLY I'm so glad. 
> 
> And scarabsi drew me some [FANTASTIC](https://scarabsi.tumblr.com/post/180506937600/illustrations-for-euphorions-jaw-droppingly) scenes, I especially adore their interpretation of Johnny's hideous flame jacket.
> 
> This is also my very first big bang in any fandom. Thanks to Traincat for running it and making it such an easy and enjoyable experience!

The days of the Galactic Republic are waning. Chancellor Osborn reigns over a puppet Senate, tightening his control over military and economic resources. Unknown to most under his sway, he is building a weapon, more powerful than anything the galaxy has ever seen. The secrets of this weapon and its design are known only to a select few, among them its mastermind Victor von Doom and his partner and collaborator, Dr. Reed Richards.

Any resistance to Osborne’s rule is crushed immediately and silently--or biding its time, a small seed planted and nourished in secret. On Coruscant, in the apartments put aside for the use Senator Susan Storm of Alderaan, three people meet to discuss gardening techniques.

+

Sue’s apartments had always been simple and elegant in a way that Johnny recognized was part of her whole deal, her whole aesthetic, but today their minimalism felt almost menacing. It was too clean, too _empty_ , too much silence to swallow up their words. The warmth and light that he’d always felt was everywhere in these rooms just by dint of them belonging to his sister seemed to have slipped away sometime in the night without saying goodbye.

“How long do we have?” Johnny asked, running his hands over his face.

“Three weeks,” Reed said, his eyebrows twitched together in a frown. “I can’t tell much, but Victor’s let that much slip. ‘Three weeks and we’ll see,’ he said, so whatever he and his mysterious bosses are doing, it’s over in three weeks.”

“God, who _talks_ like that?” asked Johnny.

Reed raised an eyebrow at him. “Not exactly the point at the moment, wouldn’t you say?”

“Okay. Okay.” Johnny stood up from Sue’s kitchen table, pacing over to her window to stare out at the towers and streets and elevated walkways of Coruscant City, like so much gold braid and knotwork against the sky.

“What happens if you skip out?” Ben asked, his huge hands toying with his mug of Ebia beer. “I know you’re not working directly for the team that’s puttin’ all this together, but I don’t like you even helpin’ the general cause. Maybe you’d slow things up. You’re not exactly replaceable.”

Reed shook his head. “I’m not,” he agreed. From anyone else it would have been arrogance. “And my loss might slow the process, but so long as Victor remains, it wouldn’t end it.”

“So get him to come with you,” Johnny said, turning on his heel. “He would, wouldn’t he? If you asked?”

Reed was staring at his hands. “I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I’m not sure what they’ve offered him to do this work.”

“We haven’t even figured out where we’re going to go, kid,” said Ben. “It’s not exactly going to be easy to get away. Adding more folks to the entourage—especially _that_ folk—ain’t a good idea. Bad enough that Reed and Suzie leave.”

The door to Sue’s apartment _shunk’d_ open, and she swept in, already taking off her heels, her white and blue cape billowing behind her. “I know, N’Mor,” she was saying into the communicator at her collar. “I appreciate it more than you know. Yes. Alright. I’ll see you then.” She clicked the comm off and sighed. “I’m not going anywhere, not yet.”

Reed stood up from the table. “What are you—”

Sue ignored him, undoing the clasp on her cape and draping it over the back of her couch. “Whatever they’re going to do, they’re doing it at the Senatorial Gala,” she said.

“Kriff,” said Johnny, and looked at Reed. “That is three weeks.”

Reed said nothing, still staring at his hands.

“N’Mor just confirmed from his own sources,” said Sue. “Which is why I’m not leaving, and neither are you. We need to be there, and you’re not getting in without me staying in this position.”

Johnny licked his lips. “So. So, what, we do nothing? We just wait for whatever’s coming, let it happen, because you want to, to schmooze at a fancy party?” He was being unfair and he knew it, but he couldn’t seem to stop. An almost frenzied frustration had a grip on this throat and wouldn’t let go.

Sue gave him an absolutely withering look. “You know that’s not what I’m saying.” She softened, her eyes turning wry. “For one thing, I hate the Gala.”

He sagged. “Sorry,” he muttered.

She crossed to him, squeezing his shoulder, as Reed did that thing he did where he geared up to try and talk Sue around on something he already knew she was intractable about. “Susan,” he said. “I understand being at the Gala is diplomatically important, but I don’t think it’s worth risking being at ground zero for whatever these people are planning.”

Sue shook her head. “It’s not about diplomacy. And we won’t be at ground zero.”

Ben looked up from his beer. “‘Scuse me?”

“There won’t be a ground zero,” Sue said, “because we’re going to stop them.”

Johnny looked at Ben. Ben looked at Reed. Reed frowned. “I don’t mean to doubt you—”

“Good,” said Sue, crossing to her kitchen counter and pouring two glasses of water. She handed one to Johnny, who downed it gratefully. “So don’t.”

Ben snorted, rolling his mug between his palms, all his considering externalized into motion.

“If we do this,” Reed said slowly, “and that's a big if, you need—something. Protection. A blaster, at least, something small that you can hide in your sleeve—you've been too vocal already to escape his attention.”

“Hey,” said Ben grouchily. “What the hell am I for?”

Reed smiled gently at him. “I don’t mean to doubt you, either, old friend,” he said, and Johnny knew he meant it just as much as he had with Sue. Every time he asked either of them Ben and Reed gave him different stories of how they’d met; the first time, it had been that Reed had found Ben on Indobok before he was fully formed, a small, crystalline thing still forming his outer layers, and saved him from being crushed by a cave-in. The second, it had been Ben, fully amassed, who caught the cave-in, preventing it from crushing Reed’s “delicate bod”. In the third, they’d saved each other from a volcanic eruption through some extremely unlikely-sounding acrobatics. The only consistent detail was that now someone owed someone a Wookie-style life debt, even though Johnny was pretty sure that wasn’t a thing for B’rknaa, and Ben had taken it upon himself to continue to protect said delicate form. And, at some point in the last five years, he’d decided that oath of protection extended to Sue, and, to Johnny’s occasional chagrin, to Johnny himself.

He mostly appreciated it. He really did. There was a lot you could get away with when you had a half ton of walking, talking rock backing you up.

“Good,” said Ben, like a gravelly mockingbird. “So don’t.”

“But you can’t be everywhere,” Reed continued. “And if the growing xenophobic movement in the Senate has any connection to Osborne and the people Victor are working for, which I believe it does, you presence at the Gala may no longer be welcome in three months.”

Sue crossed to him, draping herself over his shoulders where he sat. “I have my vibro-knife,” she said quietly. “And.” She looked up at Johnny, at the empty glass in his hand. “Hey, Johnny, throw that at me.”

Johnny blinked. “Sorry, what?”

“Chuck it at me,” Sue said, taking a few steps back from Reed. “Hard as you can.”

Johnny stared at her. “Why?”

“Uh,” said Ben. “Suzie, I dunno what—"

“Johnny,” Sue said. Her eyes met his, calm, certain, with just a hint of excitement. “Trust me, and throw it.”

He did. Not as hard as he could—his brain shrieked _Jonathan Storm that is your sister_ in the middle of the motion in Aunt Marygay’s best shriek, making his muscles falter, but it wasn’t exactly gentle, either. He barely had time to be horrified before it bounced off Sue, a few inches from her skin, and she caught it.

“Wait,” he said, blinking. “Wait, do that again.”

Sue smirked at him and flicked her wrist. The glass sailed back to him in too-straight a line, not arcing at all, and when he caught it it hit his palm with an odd weight, as if someone had been holding it and dropped it into his hand.

Reed stood up from the table abruptly. “This is what you've been doing with N’mor?”

Sue nodded, her eyes sparkling with pride. “You suspected me of something else?” she asked, arch.

“No,” Reed assured her, shaking his head.

From the table, Ben said, “ _Well_ …”

Johnny threw the glass at him, instead. It bounced off his rocky shoulder, and he caught it before it shattered against the floor. “Hey! Was only kiddin’.”

Reed had crossed to Sue, holding both her hands. “This is,” he said, and then tried again. “Have you—have you told anyone?”

Sue raised her eyebrows. “Before my family? No, of course not.”

“Aren’t you gonna have to like, report to the Jedi Council or something?” Johnny asked.

“I'm sure pretty Prince N’Mor has some cool tricks but don't you get to like, be a padawan now?”

There were a lot of things going on in his head—shock, pride, the creeping, constant fear that had been growing for months--but a new one that he was currently trying to ignore was _jealousy,_ thick and copper on his tongue and absolutely ridiculous considering the circumstances. Considering the risk they were under. Considering Sue wasn’t doing this for _fun,_ considering what this might mean, considering everything that Johnny’s stupid stressed-out heart didn’t want to consider because it was easier to retreat and wail about things being unfair.

It was just. It was just the Jedi had always been so _cool,_ with their cloaks and their codes and their mysterious Council. It was just that Johnny used to lie awake, staring at the ceiling and giving himself headaches trying to lift his toy speeder in the air with his mind. It was just that he was a directionless, useless kid, unable to do anything to help his family or his, his _Republic,_ against a threat he hadn’t even really believed was real until six months ago, and if he had a lightsaber in his hand maybe he could _do_ something. But no, it was Sue—the already brilliant, hyper-competent Sue--who got to have this, too.

“The Jedi aren’t the only tradition that teaches proper use of the force,” Sue said, pulling him out of his spiral. “Besides, who on the Council do you suggest I trust? Xavier? Blackagar?” She raised an eyebrow at Reed. “Victor?”

Reed opened his mouth. Usually the gears of his mind moved too fast for Johnny to see, but sometimes he slowed down, weighed his words, and Johnny’s long exposure to him allowed him to follow along perfectly. Right now there was a part of Reed that wanted, desperately, to insist that Sue could trust Victor, because there was a part of Reed that wanted, desperately, Victor to be worth trusting.

He wasn’t. Johnny had been pretty sure of that the first time he heard them fight. Not loud and sharp and flash-in-the-pan like his own comfortable arguments with Ben, burning out into grudgingly apologies minutes, sometimes seconds, after the last angry syllable. Reed and Victor fought quietly, bitterly, about things Johnny, from his place in the laboratory doorway, could only partially hear and, if he was honest with himself, even more partially understand.

What he did understand was that the main sticking point between them appeared to be that Reed, for all his flaws, had an actual appreciation and respect for sentient life, and a guy who had a problem with that was a guy who Johnny trusted about as far as he could throw him.

Johnny was pretty certain this whole plan would bring that difference into sharp relief, and he was also pretty sure Reed wasn’t ready to come to terms with that. There were about a hundred things Johnny wasn’t ready to come to terms with himself, though, so he couldn’t really blame him.

“No,” said Reed at last. “No. I suppose not.”

“Aren’t they gonna track you down and stuff, though?” Johnny asked. “I thought they could, like—” he wiggled his fingers, “—sense it.”

“They can, usually. N’Mor has these creatures in his quarters, these lizards. Ysalimiri. They block others from sensing any Force powers being used. He says it only works when you’re physically around them, though, that every experiment done to extend it beyond their living presence has failed.” Sue reached under her high, white collar and fished out a small black thread. Hanging from it like a pendant was a little vial of viscous, yellowish liquid, like pine sap. “And I said, I know someone who would hear that as a challenge.”

Reed took the vial from her hand, his eyes already distant. “Blood?”

Sue nodded, watching him sideways, smiling slightly.

Reed turned the vial over, looking at it against the light. “I’ll need to actually examine the creatures,” he said. “Get a sense for how they produce the dampening effect.”

Sue kept watching him. “N’Mor won’t like it, but I bet I can convince him.”

Reed caught her expression, his mouth twisting. “You only love me for my brain,” he said, but it was barely accusatory.

“Damn right,” Sue murmured, and leaned up and kissed him. Some of the tension in his shoulders—as ever-present as Johnny’s own dread—eased.

“Wow,” Johnny said. “My sister. Force-user.”

“I heard it was s’posed to run in families,” Ben remarked. “Unlucky break, kid.”

Johnny made a face. “Sue, do that cool Force-toss thing with the glass so I can throw it at Ben again.”

“Don’t break my things, Johnny,” Sue murmured, her arms still around Reed’s neck. Usually Johnny would make fun of them for the PDA, but Reed was (rightfully) in awe of Sue like 90% of the time, even when she was just doing stuff like making bad sandwiches. He could allow them to bask in this revelation for a while.

Especially if they were right about what was coming, and moments to bask were going to get a lot rarer really, really soon.

He shoved that thought back down into the pit of his stomach where it belonged and cleared his throat, looking at Ben. “Wish this was the sort of problem you could just break a few heads to solve.”

Ben sighed. “Me, too,” he said, and poured the remains of his beer into the glass.

+

 _Meanwhile, on the crime-ridden outer rim_ _ecumenopolis_ _of Nar Shadaa..._

Peter Parker stared at himself in the mirror, pushing hair that was tacky with sweat and blood off his forehead.

“No more Gamorreans,” he muttered to himself. He looked human—he was human, of a kind—and fighting big non-humans always got the crowds riled up, but the risk was too high. There was a new split in his eyebrow, this one big enough to scar. He sighed. A lot of his livelihood depended on keeping his skin free of scars. Scars marked the times you’d survived, added up to a kind of perceived shield of toughness, and if Peter looked tough he made less money off the people betting against him. He lifted the hem of his shirt to squint critically at the bruising on his ribs.

Something shifted in the corner of his dressing room. He didn’t exactly hear it, whoever it was was too careful for that, but he was instantaneously aware of motion where there had been none. Moving casually, he slipped his fingers through the durasteel knuckles in his pocket.

“Don’t worry.” In the mirror a shadow gathered itself, shifted forward, gained a third dimension by allowing the light to pick out its angles and curves. “You're still pretty.”

Peter relaxed, minutely, though he kept the hand curled into his pocket next to the weapon. The low, yellow light made her hair leonine rather than moon-pale, but his visitor was instantly recognizable. There weren’t many Cathar on Nar Shadaa, for one; even fewer without the collar that marked them as belonging to one of the Hutts or other more minor crime lords.

Fel’icia Hardy’s throat was bare. Jarringly so—it was possible her skin was scarred, preventing the black fur that covered the rest of her body regrowing to fill in the circle of white, but Peter had always suspected she kept it shaved. A reminder of her past, a defiance that marked her freedom as one hard-won.

“Fel’icia,” he said, watching her approach in the mirror. “What are you doing here?”

She leaned down, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “I can’t come watch my lover fight without an ulterior motive?”

Peter raised an eyebrow at her. “Ex-lover,” he corrected, “and I don’t think you can do anything without an ulterior motive.”

“I know,” Fel’icia said. “That was always your problem.” She sighed and ran a claw-tipped hand through her mane of silver hair. “Unfortunately in this case you’re right. I need you to transport something for me.”

Peter frowned. “Transport something? On planet?”

She shook her head. “Coruscant.”

“I don’t have a ship,” Peter objected, “and I can’t leave, not for as long as it would take to get to the core, I’m scheduled for two more fights this week alone and I need that money—”

“The ship won’t be a problem,” Fel’icia said, interrupting him, “and neither will the money.” She leaned back against his dressing table, crossing her long legs, and reached out to touch his chin, turning his face up so he was looking at her. “Besides, I already called your guy and cancelled those fights.”

Peter gaped at her. “You _what—_ ”

Fel'icia tugged him upward by the jaw; despite himself, he let her, his hands coming up and curling around her hips to steady them both as she spoke against his mouth: “One job,” she murmured, “and then we’re both out of this game.”

He kissed her—it would have taken more self-control than his exhausted body could muster not to—but pulled back immediately, leaving her perched smirking on his table. “I’m not a thief.”

She chuckled, the sound rolling in her throat like a sarcastic purr. “If I needed something stolen I’d do it myself.”

He cracked his neck, conceding the point. “I’m not a fence, either,” he said, significantly less firmly.

He could feel her eyes on him. “Not even for a good cause?”

He turned, eyeing at her suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

She crossed her arms, suddenly more serious. “I know you’re not much of a big picture guy, but even you must have noticed the shift in the wind. The streets have been buzzing with it for months—new back alley deals with high-ranking Senate officials, the dissolution of _old_ back-alley deals with high-ranking Senate officials because those officials are disappearing.”

Peter worked his tongue around in his mouth. He’d noticed something was up—mostly with the other fighters at the gym he trained at; half of them suddenly hired out as muscle, the other half checking over their shoulders. He'd figured it was a shift in gang politics, though, in the complex understructure of smuggler rings and weapons dealers, nothing to do with the Senate.

“Things are starting to change, even here.” She held up a hand, extending her claws and examining their shine. “There’s a new power in the Core, and it’s bad news.”

Peter frowned at her. “What do you mean, bad news? The Senate is the Senate, there have been changes in leadership before—”

Fel'icia shook her head. “Not like this. If what I’m hearing is true, the Senate _won’t_ be the Senate. Not anymore.”

Peter shifted, staring at her. He wanted to tell her she was being ridiculous, that that was impossible—the Senate had always been the Senate, the Republic had always been the Republic—but there was a kind of fear in her eyes he’d never seen, and she was too smart to be spooked by rumors. “And this thing that you want me to transport—?”

Fel'icia licked her lips. “There are people trying to stop the turning of the tide. In three weeks there’s this party on Coruscant—the Senatorial Gala. The guys behind the oncoming coup are planning something there, and my contacts are planning a counter-move. I need you there to take the goods when they’re handed off to you and bring them to me.” She reached into the pocket of her black jumpsuit and tossed him a data chip.

He caught it. “What’s this?”

“Access codes,” she said. “For your new ship. Coordinates for where you’ll find it, too.” She smirked. “Don’t kriff it up too bad, it’s on loan.”

He pocketed the cylinder, sliding it into his jacket next to his durasteel knuckles. “One more thing.”

Fel'icia paused on her way out the door, raising her eyebrows.

He gestured at himself, the sweat and drying blood on his shirt. “How am _I_ supposed to get an invite to the Senatorial Gala?”

Her smirk grew. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out. Like I said, you’re still pretty.”

Peter watched her cross to his door—not willing, he guessed, to reveal her tricks by leaving the way she'd come in. “Fel'icia.”

She turned, all one smooth, silver-gold line, her hair swept over her shoulder, her cat’s face picked out against shadow.

He swallowed. “Last I heard you're doing pretty well for yourself. You've got other contacts, people who work for you full time. Why come to me with this?”

She blinked slow, almost sad. “Because despite what you might think of me, I know I can trust you.”

Peter opened his mouth to respond to that, but there was nothing he could say. There never had been. And anyway, as soon as he hesitated she was gone.

The door closed behind her and Peter shook himself. He crossed quickly to his dressing table, grabbing his pack and sweeping the medical supplies off into it. On second thought he grabbed a tube of bacta back out of it and smeared some on the split in his eyebrow. He opened his drawers, taking out his jacket, his makeup, the faulty old blaster he kept in there for emergencies. His hand hesitated over the dusty bottle of cheap Daruvvian  champagne tucked back into his bottom drawer, bought for a celebration of freedom increasingly unlikely to ever come.

_Things are starting to change, even here._

He slid the bottle into his bag.

He took the back way out of the building, slipping through the door and between the two humming and crunching trash compactors in the alley behind the gladiator club. Foul-smelling steam rose from the metal containers, and he pulled the cloth he kept around his neck for these purposes up over his mouth and nose.  The cloth was treated with special, expensive oil that clarified the air that passed through it—a luxury anywhere else, but here, for someone in Peter’s line of work, a necessity. The lower streets of Nar Shadaa were a haze of varyingly toxic fumes. Six months in this place without protection would permanently kriff up even his genetically hardier Sedesian lungs.

The weather on Sedesia was harsh, but not chemical-atmosphere harsh, and Peter’s human ancestors hadn’t evolved for this. Their long colonization of the high-gravity planet had specialized their bodies for strength, speed, and, as Peter’s agent (well, former agent) used to say, never kriffing going down when they should. Transposed to a mid-grav world like this, that made him an effective vornskr in shaak clothing, one of the few non-cybernetically-enhanced humans on the professional fighting circuit, if you could dignify the string of converted spice warehouses he fought in by calling them that.

He’d never been to Sedesia. When he was little Aunt May had told him his parents had bought their way here under the false assumption that Nar Shadaa, as a “hub of galactic economy”, would allow them to live a more comfortable life than they’d had eking out an existence on the slopes of the endless Sedesian mountains. But as he aged she’d let the truth peek through, slowly, like scratching off the gilt on a 5-credit lotto card to reveal a cheerful _try again!_ They’d not bought their way. They’d been bought. And like most who are bought by Hutts, even the hardiest, they’d been used up and thrown away, leaving Peter, only a baby, with May, and, for too-brief a while, with Ben.

He was brought up short and broken out of his memories by a huge, blunt-fingered hand against his chest. “Par Ker.”

Peter blinked and waited for the rest of his accoster’s body to emerge from the shadows. “Zittoun,” he greeted, his heart sinking.

“Just the guy I was hoping to see,” said Zittoun, through his intense underbite. Peter had never been to Klatooine, but there must be something in their natural diet that encouraged jaws the size of Renda bear traps.

“Can’t say the feeling’s mutual,” he muttered. “Look, I _just_ won a fight—” he gestured to his eyebrow, “—and the credits will be in your account tomorrow, I have to move some money around.”

Zittoun glared at him suspiciously through tiny, deep-set eyes. “For this month,” he allowed, “but what about the past two?”

Peter clenched his jaw. “I _paid_ you for the last two.”

Zittoun grinned nastily and spread his wide hands. “Ain’t got no record of it.”

Peter’s fists twitched, and Zittoun caught the motion. His grin, improbably, grew wider. “You going to hit me, Par Ker?”

He could. It might kriff up his hands for a few days, but no more than the fight with the Gamorrean had. But the Klatooinian was just a (metaphorical, it paid to be precise in a place like this) appendage off a central body, and you don’t get a knockout by breaking fingers. Peter sighed and let his hands loosen. “Three weeks,” he said. “Three weeks, and I’ll be paid up and out of your hair forever.”

Zittoun kept his hand on Peter’s chest a moment longer, then flicked it suprisingly dextrously upward, chucking him just too hard under the chin. “Don’t get my hopes up too high, now,” he said, and slunk nastily into the shadows again.

“Yeah, I’m having trouble believing it myself,” Peter muttered after him, the data chips heavy in his pocket.

He half-jogged up the narrow, rusted stairs to his apartment, tapping his access code into the pad by the door. The two rooms he shared with May were dark, and he immediately shifted his movement so as not to wake her. She’d been trying to insist for years that he should move out, that she could take care of herself. He didn’t doubt she could—not a drop of Sedesian blood in her and she was still the toughest person he’d ever known—but that dream of individuality, of personal space and a life he lived for himself, was something she’d carried with her from wherever she’d come from, and there was no room for it to take root here. No room for anything to grow, packed together in this teeming hive of sentience, no open space for light to get in. She’d never be able to keep Zittoun off her back, and he’d never be able to find anywhere better, not agent-less, not now everyone was getting wise to his strength.

It was a dream choked out before it even began, and they both knew it. Besides, he wouldn’t know what to do with a real space of his own. Miss the hell out of her, mostly.

He made his way to his closet and the small workbench next to it by feel, grabbing a few changes of clothes on his way. A shirt he thought was mostly still white, a pair of pants with only one mostly-invisible re-done seam. A slightly threadbare vest that made him look too much like a smuggler for this kind of event but he didn’t exactly have _options—_ Fel'icia’s compliments were appreciated and all, but Peter had seen the holovids of the gala in previous years, beamed to public screens in places like this to _incentivize_ the masses like him. Kriff. The only thing it incentivized Peter to do was shove his fist through the face of the next rich core-worlder who spent on a haircut the amount of credits that would free himself and May from this place forever—

May. He finished shoving his clothes into the pack and fished around on his workbench, skipping over spanners and vibro-saws until his fingers found what he was looking for. It was the recorder and hologram projector from an old astro-mech droid, disassembled and reassembled into a cube about the size of Peter’s fist.

Peter slapped it. It flickered, then buzzed. “Record,” he said quietly, and when it shifted blue he said, “Hey, Aunt May. It’s me. Obviously.” He gnawed at his lip, thinking. “I have to go out for a while—maybe a long while. Maybe weeks. I paid Zittoun before I left and the rest is in your account.” He winced, leaning wrong on his bruised side. “Don’t, uh, spend it all in one place.” He tapped the cube to switch it to red, then tapped it again to switch it back. “Also, I saw Fel'icia today. She’s doing well, I think.” He hesitated. May had always kept her feelings about Fel'icia close to the chest, but he knew that she wished her well, even if it was with reservations. “This thing I’m doing, it’s gonna help both of us.”

He licked his lips. “If I don’t come back,” he said, then shook his head, tapped the cube again to stop it, and wound it back ten seconds to erase the last bit.

May herself was asleep on the bed across the room. She was going deaf, so there was no chance he would wake her as he left, but it felt wrong to just. Go. He crossed to her, looking down at the quiet breathing shape of her, a small figure hunched by the weight of a long, hard life, but built still from head to toe of motherly kindness and iron will.

Peter brushed the hair from her face. “I’ll be back soon,” he murmured. May didn’t stir, even when he pressed a kiss to her cheek, her skin dry and soft against his mouth the way only the paper thin skin of the old was soft. “I love you.”

He swung his bag onto his back and let himself out.

+

Johnny tossed the vial of ysalimiri blood between his hands. In the sunlight streaming through Sue’s windows it looked thick and cloudy and altogether unpleasant. “So this stuff is really working?” he asked doubtfully.

Sue hummed. “Apparently,” she said. “Reed swears that to the Jedi Council I’m all but invisible.” She glanced at the door. “Speaking of Reed.”

Johnny blinked. “What?”

The door opened, and Reed walked through it, head down, reading something off a datapad.

Sue shot Johnny a pleased look. He gaped at her. “How did you—”

She twitched her fingers at him, her smile growing.

Reed looked up from his pad. “Oh,” he said. “Johnny, good, I’m glad you’re here.”

Johnny raised his eyebrows at him. “Oh yeah?”

Reed nodded. “We’ve found you a date for the gala.”

Sue snorted. Johnny looked between them. “Sorry, what? You’ve found me a what?”

Reed crossed to the circular device set into the floor that Sue used for hologram communications and briefings. It rose from the floor as he approached, a round railing of machinery around a blank space, so that anyone—usually a member of the Council—who called in while standing could be fully displayed in its center. Johnny had always figured it was for the sake of dignity and expediency that they were always standing. It must take a long time to arrange those Jedi robes in a way that didn’t look awkward or bulky while sitting down.

Reed removed a small cylinder from his belt and slotted it into the side of the machine, and in the space above the machine a flickering head appeared.

It was just a head—human, or at least human-appearing, with short hair, a nose that had been broken at least once, and a full, generous mouth. Most of the standard Senatorial quarters had hologram projectors that, like those in most ships, only displayed shades of blue. However, Reed had messed around with Sue’s almost immediately when she’d moved in, so Johnny could tell that both his hair and his eyes were a warm sort of brown.

Reed glanced at his data pad again, then at Sue. “No one can hear us?”

Sue let her eyes flutter closed. Johnny watched. For just a moment he felt like he’d been submerged underwater. Something intangible but present slid outward from his sister’s still face and over him, and then his ears popped and everything felt absolutely normal again.

Reed—apparently feeling nothing at all—was already talking. Johnny shook himself and tried to focus on what he was saying.

“Robert Drake,” he said, “though it’s suspected he has other aliases. Nominally an accountant, occasionally a smuggler, and actually an agent for a resistance group based on Denusia. They’ve been targeting the transports of minerals that Victor and his team members need for whatever they’ve been producing. We know it’s them because they sign whatever they leave behind.” He pressed a few buttons on the device and a second image joined the first, a crate of what looked like Vulca minerals with a crude X painted on it.

Johnny raised his eyebrows. “Elegant,” he said dryly.

Reed gave him an amused look and turned back to his notes. “I chose this group for their demonstrated capacity for military prowess, and their absolute anonymity. They seem to be quite a number of individuals, and their base on Denusia I believe to be only one of many. If anyone can hide or destroy the weaponry we intend to steal—or, if the worst happens, learn to use it against its creator—it will be them.”

Johnny nodded. “Okay,” he said, “with you so far. But why this guy, and why am I bringing him to the gala?”

“When I discreetly made contact with the Denusian rebels they informed me that Drake would be on planet next week as part of another job. The easiest way to do the hand-off would be for him to be present at the Gala for the theft—the fewer moving pieces, the better. The only way to get into the Republic Gala is to be invited, or to come with someone who is invited.” Reed gestured with a hand. “Thus.”

Johnny turned back to the hologram. It was a handsome face, he could admit that. But. “He can’t go with Sue?”

“No,” said Sue, “because Reed also has to be able to get in, once he has the prototype. He’s my plus one. Robert here will have to be yours.”

Johnny opened his mouth to protest, then stopped. He had no real reason to resist this. Sue and Reed were exchanging glances, unsure of why he _would_ resist it. It would be a way to be useful, after all. Not force-user useful, or genius-inventor useful, or even walking-mountain useful like Ben, but—it would be a part to play, that justified his role in this grand, high-stakes unfolding of events that was more than just Johnny Storm, little brother. But.

But it was just that his record with romance was dismally bad— _laughably_ bad—and he’d sort of decided to give the whole thing up as a bad job, as something he didn’t get to have, not the way Sue and Reed did. He’d sort of decided it was time to jettison his someday hope for children and a family of his own, send it careening out into space to join all the other unreachable garbage that got caught in the orbits of planets and eventually burned up in the crossfire of some skirmish between local crime lords. It was just that Johnny’s last boyfriend, if you could call him that, had attempted to steal classified government secrets from Sue and kill and/or seduce Reed when Reed managed to stop him, and his last girlfriend—if you could call her that—had turned out to be a shapeshifting Clawdite impersonating Ben’s ex girlfriend and attempting to use Johnny as an incubator for her eggs.

It was just that going on a pretend date with a handsome rebel sounded both impossibly normal and absolutely exhausting, because it was exactly the kind of thing he would have daydreamed incessantly about as a teenager, and he’d spent the better part of the past ten years convincing himself that none of his daydreams were really ever going to come true.

He clenched his fists and was surprised to find he was still holding the small vial of ysalamiri blood. He opened his hand, staring at it in his palm—shifting, cloudy, alien, a tiny microcosm of Johnny’s future, of all of their future, of the future of the entire damn galaxy. All of a sudden he was furious with himself, for how dramatic he was being when the stakes were so high, when Reed and Sue were doing so much without a second thought.

Sue shifted, like she wanted to step forward. “Johnny—”

“I’ll do it,” he said. “Obviously I’ll do it, sign me up, he’s hot.” He didn’t bother looking at the hologram again. “You said he’d be on-planet next week?”

Reed nodded. “My contact with the rebels said he would transfer instructions for where to meet him when he got here. I thought it might be nice for the two of you to meet well in advance of the Gala, get to know one another.” He waved a hand. “Bond. Plan. You know.”

“Right,” said Johnny. He tossed the vial of blood back to Sue. “Sounds good.”

He left Reed and Sue there discussing how Reed was planning on getting the prototype weapon away from Victor without him noticing, taking the steps outside her apartment door two at a time. Four steps up there was that feeling again, of being underwater and then suddenly surfacing, and there was something in the ear-pop of it, or in the combination of hope and dread that his new role gave him, or just the ever-present knowledge that within weeks his whole world would collapse around him; whatever it was robbed him of his anger at himself and his determination both and pushed him right to the edge of tears.

He exited the stairs onto the long, open public rooftop park that stretched between the building housing Sue and several other Senators when they were on-planet and the buildings neighboring it, providing a roof and rain shelter to the alleys between and a vast green space for them to entertain their various publics. Earlier in the day this space would be alive with picnickers---generally the definition of “public” was decided upon by the particular Senator whose rooms bordered the particular election of park, and it was well known on the Coruscant streets that Senator Storm had a unique combined definition that invited everyone who wished to be there but had absolutely no tolerance for violence of any kind. This second aspect was often effectively enforced either by Ben’s glowering, silent presence or--perhaps worse--by Sue herself

The night was gathering over Coruscant, though, and whatever families had been here earlier had gone home. Johnny glanced around and was half disappointed, half relieved to see no sign of Ben, either. His friend’s gruff sympathy was always appreciated, but Johnny knew he’d been seeing Alicia again and a good portion of the stuff lurking bitter in the back of his throat was wrapped up in everything that had happened with her shapeshifting imposter. He had no real desire to bring those ghosts to light for Ben when he could just swallow them down again where they belonged.

The sun was sinking down beyond the spires of the city center, turned from the lovely golden it had been this afternoon to a deep, baleful red that drew the eye to it and almost beyond it, a color that reminded you of the void it was hiding. Staring into its eye Johnny let himself cry, silently, his whole heart pulled outward into that beyond, longing to be at the controls of a ship again and not stuck here playing politics—a game he was generally terrible at—for the lives of everyone he cared about and everyone he hadn’t even met.

+

The ship was small, but absolutely serviceable, and had more open space by far than the apartments Peter shared with May. He shouldn’t have bothered to grab clothes from his apartment—he opened the door to the sleeping quarters and found it was more than half closet, an array of clothes in a variety of formal and semi-formal styles hanging like curtains above a low, bunk-style bed. He swiped through them for a moment. There were shirts, vests, jackets of much better quality than anything he’d ever owned for himself, ranging from a wild, pearlescent white brocade to simple, almost severe black. There was even a cape of some heavy, deep red stuff. It all even looked to be in his size.

“Thanks, Fel,” he muttered, “but not even this is gonna get me to wear a cape.”

He made his way back to the cockpit. There was a datapad on the pilot’s chair that lit up, unlocked, when he touched it. There were several files that he scrolled past - the ship registration information, codes that let him leave atmo. He opened up the file that said “drop instructions”, wondering if this was something Fel'icia put together herself or if she had one of her new flunkies do it.

He got his answer when Fel'icia’s face appeared on the screen. For a second, maybe before she realized she was recording, she looked serious, almost grave, and then her cat’s eyes sharpened and warmed. “Hey, lover,” she said. “Thanks for taking this on for me.”

Peter sighed. “Yeah,” he said, though obviously she couldn’t hear him.

“It’s a pretty simple deal,” Fel'icia continued. “No heavy lifting. You probably won’t even have to break any heads this time.”

Peter winced. This wasn’t the first time they’d worked together on a job—usually smaller stuff, on-planet, definitely never something on the sort of heroic, Republic-preserving scale that this was. And occasionally—whether on a job or not—Fel'icia got hassled by idiots too dumb to know not to mess with a Cathar, and sometimes she just didn’t want to deal with it herself, so he stepped in.

When they’d been dating she told him it was because she liked seeing him stand up for her, that seeing that strength from his unassuming human form was thrilling. But it had happened a few times since they’d broken up, too, and Peter suspected that part of it was because she knew she wasn’t the only one thrilled by the violence, that shoving an unsuspecting asshole’s face into a wall scratched an itch at the back of his throat, satisfying and nauseating at once.

He couldn’t decide if it was reassuring or worrying that he thought the reason she knew was because she had the same itch herself.

The Fel'icia on the recording gave him a knowing look. “Here’s the deal: There’s a team of scientists working with Senator Osborne of Naboo to create a weapon that he plans to use to dismantle the Republic entirely and install himself as supreme leader—king, or emperor, or similar.”

She explained that taking the weapon away from him won’t stop him—he was too entrenched for that, has his hands in too many different areas of the Republic—but it would delay him, ostensibly for long enough for Fel'icia’s unnamed allies to organize an actual resistance to his dark reign. Peter only half listened, laying in his course to Coruscant into his ship’s computer.

He kind of hated space travel. He liked it well enough when other people were in charge—it was nice to get away form the stinking scalefin-can closeness of the Nar Shadaa streets, to be reminded of how much there was outside of the planet where he’d been eking out an existence all his life. He let what she was saying wash over him, all of it feeling very distant—did it really matter if a king made the calls in the core rather than a senate? What effect would that have on the Huttese slumlords that actually shaped life around the people he cared about?

“This is the part where it gets a little more complicated,” Fel'icia said, “so listen up.”

Peter blinked and looked back at the data pad.

“We’re not the only ones looking to get our hands on this weapon,” Fel'icia said. “There’s a terrorist group out of Denusia who got the jump on us and already contacted one of the scientists involved, a Dr. Reed Richards. Richards got cold feet about the whole ‘create a super weapon for a would-be tyrant’ thing, and he’s hatched a plot to steal the prototype when it’s unveiled at the gala. Richards will be attending with his partner and presumably co-conspirator, Senator Susan Storm of Alderaan.”

Peter raised his eyebrows. He’d heard of Senator Storm—Alderaan was an old, traditional planet, and historically had been represented by members of their ruling family, usually a princess or a queen. However, the last queen had died without heirs, and outlined in her will that they should hold general elections. Storm was the first ever actually elected representative of the planet, and she’d secured the position almost fifteen years ago at the tender age of 22. Senatorial terms were planet-specific, and while there had been a few murmurings about setting a term limit now that the position wasn’t in the royal family, in general everyone seemed happy to have her continue to do the job.

“While at the Gala, Richards will hand off the prototype to the person attending the party with the Senator’s younger brother, Jonathan. The Denusian terrorists plan for that person to be one of their number, a smuggler named Robert Drake.” Fel'icia arched an eyebrow. “We plan for that person to be you.”

So. Not only did Fel'icia expect him to hobnob with Core wealth, but she expected him to hobnob with very smart, accomplished Core wealth. He ran his hands over his face. Oh, this was _so_ not worth it.

Peter stopped the recording there to sink back in his pilot’s chair. He finished laying in the course, had a short conversation with an extremely bored-sounding transit official who didn’t give his exit codes a second thought, and uncomfortably maneuvered the small ship into the blackness of space.

Once he was surrounded by stars—he _felt_ the void slip up his spine and into his muscles, locking them up with a tension totally different than anything he felt on-planet—he checked out the rest of the information on the data pad. There was a list of attendees to the Gala, mostly names Peter was vaguely familiar with, and several sets of coordinates: for the apartments of Senator Storm (a bit forward, Peter thought, to just show up unannounced), a speeder shop where he could get planetside transport, and a complex of laboratories Peter assumed was where Richards was developing the weapon.

He retreated to the bunk area and spent the rest of the spaceflight to Coruscant reading through papers Richards had published, often alongside his lab partner Victor von Doom, doing pullups on the doorway to the cockpit, and slipping in and out of uneasy sleep. What kind of weapon could upset the balance of power in the whole galaxy? What did Fel'icia’s contacts intend to do with it? What did Drake and the Denusians?

How the kriff did he always let himself get talked into stuff like this by a pretty face?

The customs guy at Coruscant sounded more awake than the one at Nar Shadaa but had no more interest in checking his credentials—Fel'icia must have _great_ contacts these days—and Peter decided to check out the speeder shop first. Dropping in on the Senator unannounced was great and all but he wanted to be mobile on-planet and snoop around—make sure Drake and his cronies hadn’t beaten him here—before he did anything that might get a blaster drawn on him for being an imposter.

What exactly he planned to do if he _had_ been beaten to the punch was something for future-Peter to worry about. Present Peter had his hands full picking a speeder he could afford and that he knew how to drive but that wouldn’t fall apart and drop him six stories and break his spine.

He wandered between the three that the speeder shop had in their display room, trying to figure out any meaningful difference between them. Finally, giving up, he lifted one of them up one-handed off the blocks it was resting on (the owner of the shop, smartly, had their display models powered off so they weren’t wasting power hovering in place) to check under it for anything he could tell about the state of the engine.

“You’re, uh, you’re really strong,” said someone from behind him.

Peter turned and raised his eyebrows at the speaker. “Thanks,” he said. “Hi.”

The guy—blond, blue-eyed, shirtless—stared back at him for a minute, then laughed at himself. “Sorry,” he said. He stuck out a hand. “I’m Johnny.”

Peter looked him over quickly, checking for recognizable tattoos, rings, sigils, starting with the hand. It was an incongruous hand, grease-stained and clearly calloused, when the rest of this guy was cleaner than anyone Peter had seen in months, maybe years. He was stripped to the waist, but the cloth tied around said waist and that of his pants were both way more expensive than anything Peter had ever owned, or even the stuff in the ship Fel'icia had gotten him, and judging by the state of the hands they weren’t even his good clothes. Johnny. He reviewed the information Fel'icia had given him, and—with a sinking feeling—realized it matched the figure in front of him. Jonathan Storm, Senator Susan Storm’s little brother. His date.

Don’t get him wrong—the dude was _very_ pretty. Pretending to be at a ball with him beat the hell out of—well, getting the hell beaten out of him, as might have happened in the fight he’d had booked for tonight up until Fel'icia destroyed his career. But he was nowhere near ready for a meet and greet with the target, which is what would happen if he introduced himself as Drake. He needed to stall, but stall in a way where he could still be Drake later if he needed to. How the hell was he supposed to do that?

 _Start by shaking his hand, asshole,_ he told himself, and made himself focus back on Johnny.

From what his file had told him he was a pretty face, mostly useless. Politics-wise, anyway. He wasn’t about to make any assumptions about anything else.

Still, it wasn’t likely he was carrying a knife, so Peter shook. “Peter,” he said. He looked him over again, more overt about it this time. “You work here?”

He didn’t, clearly, not if he was who Peter thought he was, but there were only so many reasons one would be shirtless in a speeder-repair shop, and it was the least indelicate way to ask.

“Yeah,” said Johnny easily, to Peter’s surprise, and then corrected himself. “Well, I don’t _work here_ work here, but Silenia lets me help out around the place sometimes when we’re on planet.”

He waved at the front counter, and the absolutely ripped Twi’lek woman currently haggling impressively over the price of power converters—Silenia, presumably—waved a distracted hand back at him.

Peter, with an effort, controlled his wince. Kriff. _That’s_ why Fel'icia had given him these coordinates. She was setting up this little meet-and-greet—had probably told him she would, if he’d bothered to listen to the rest of her brief. He made a mental note to do that, later.

Johnny shrugged, shoulders loose. “It’s nice to get your hands dirty, you know?”

Peter twitched his chin in a way that wasn’t quite a nod, all up, no down. “In my line of work it’s usually more refreshing when I get to get my hands clean,” he joked.

Johnny raised his eyebrows. “And what kind of work is that?”

Peter cursed himself internally. It had been a long time since he’d been offworld, and he forgot he couldn’t make the same jokes here as he could in the hives of Nar Shadaa. Here, people did real work, work that didn’t involve sweat and illicit deals and other people’s blood. “I’m, uh, a courier,” he said, because hey, currently that was true, and then scrambled to try and play off the joke, to fit it into the world this Senator’s brother would understand.  “You’d be surprised at the stuff people send by discreet messenger these days. The _scandals_ I’ve seen.”

Johnny didn’t laugh. Instead his face shifted, and he looked. Weird, almost grave. “I don’t think I would be surprised, really.”

Peter raised his eyebrows, hoping it would come across as salacious rather than suddenly suspicious. How much did he know? “Heard some hot rumors?”

Johnny’s extremely blue eyes narrowed slightly, like he was evaluating Peter for trustworthiness, and then he leaned closer. “You know Prince N’mor?”

Peter blinked at him. “Not, uh, personally.” He was the monarch of the water-world Tion, and he was on Fel’s gala guest list, but that was about the extent of it.

Johnny chuckled in a way that rang immediately false in Peter’s well-trained bullkriff-detecting ears. “You’d be one of the few who don't, then. Guy’s notorious for his affairs.” He leaned closer, artificially conspiratorial, and Peter could smell oil and clean sweat and expensive shampoo. “I hear these days he's been hanging around Senator Storm of Alderaan.”

“Really,” said Peter, trying to keep his voice the proper mix of intrigued, surprised, and impressed, while his mind worked rapidly. Why would Johnny want him to think his sister was having an affair? He knew himself to be pretty bad at the whole political intrigue thing, but what possible benefit could having some stranger think N’Mor and Senator Storm were sleeping together have for their current predicament?

Unless. Unless N’Mor _was_ hanging around the Senator, but for other reasons--reasons that would be much, much more dangerous if discovered than an illicit tryst. And Johnny, reading Peter as a useful gossip, was providing them cover, so anyone seeing them together under secret circumstances would just believe the rumors to be true rather than look too close. It probably wouldn’t hurt to distance her from Richards, too, right before they pulled their heist.

He looked sideways at Johnny, impressed. His performance was a bit off--his lies a little stilted, his expressions a little overblown--but the idea was a clever one. A very clever one, and one that required he think on his feet.

Johnny was looking back at him, waiting just a touch obviously for some further answer. When it was clear that none was forthcoming, he continued the pageant, shaking his head. “First elected Senator of Alderaan, beautiful fashion icon, and now in an illicit affair with a handsome prince--some people have all the luck.”

Peter chuckled, only sort of forced. “She is gorgeous, huh.” He raised an eyebrow at Johnny. “I hear her brother’s not bad, either.”

Johnny’s eyes widened, then narrowed in sudden suspicion, and Peter moved on quickly. _Plant the seed, but don’t let it grow until you have control of the environment._ He smacked Johnny’s chest with the back of his hand. “Oh, hey, maybe you can help me out, since you sort of work here.”

Johnny blinked, thrown by the abrupt change of subject. “Uh, sure.”

Peter turned to the speeder he’d recently set down. “I’m looking for something that runs pretty quiet but comes cheap and won’t fall apart under me, you know? I’m only on planet for a few weeks, so it’d be for rent, and I’m afraid—” he turned to Johnny and have him a rueful face that was pretty much entirely genuine, “I know very little about speeders.” _Except how to take them apart and make them into something more interesting._

Johnny’s face lit up, and he launched into a detailed technical explanation of the three speeders on offer that Peter only understood about a third of. It made perfect sense, seeing him this excited and knowledgeable, that Fel'icia had thought to set up their meet-cute here. He was clearly in his element, comfortable, any guard that he might have up around a potentially dangerous contact lowered. It was a sobering thought. They’d been talking for approximately five minutes and Peter already liked the guy; it sucked to be reminded that his whole purpose here was to take advantage.

“Thank you,” he said, catching enough of the end of Johnny’s spiel to know he should probably go with door number three. “I appreciate the help.”

“Sure,” said Johnny, shooting him an easy, curled-at-the-corners smile. “Glad to be of service.”

Peter hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “So I just go tell your pal Silenia—?”

Johnny nodded, crossing his arms—it was the arms, not just the hands, that were incongruous with the soft, spoiled noble kid Peter had been expecting, the arms and the hands and the chest, really, too; it wasn’t that he was ridiculously ripped or anything, but there was muscle there, and the way he moved made Peter think he could either fight or dance or maybe both. “Yeah, she can get your credit transfer all set up.”

“Thanks,” said Peter again. He held out a hand. “It was great meeting you.”

“You, uh, you too,” said Johnny, giving him another handshake. “Maybe I’ll see you around?”

It was not without a pang of guilt that Peter pulled him in, using the grip on his hand to lean up next to his ear. “I’d expect to, if I were you,” he murmured, and then stepped back and released him in one motion, turning on his heel to go rent his speeder, and investigate a laboratory, and get his kriffing head in the game.

+

“There’s someone snooping,” Johnny told Sue. “Other than us, I mean. Reed says they're amateurish but--"

“No,” Reed said. He laid the small tracking beacon on the table between the three of them. “I said _primitive,_ as in made from simplistic materials. Unrefined, but only because of a lack of access.” He shook his head. “The skill shown in overcoming those obstacles and still creating something of this utility and sophistication is remarkable.”

“Great, so they're smart.” Johnny ran a hand over his face. “They're smart, and they're watching us, and we have no idea who they are.”

Sue was staring at the beacon. “We know who they're not,” she said. “They're not Osborne’s flunky. If they were, they'd have better tech than--what is that, a modified speeder comm?”

“It's a transcription chip tacked onto a BB-line astromech re-balancer,” Johnny said, and then, grudgingly, “it's kind of genius. Look at this.” He flipped the thing over. It waved its tiny, spider-like clasps for a second, and then flipped itself over. “Re-balancing,” Johnny repeated.

Sue tapped a finger against her lips. “It’s not still recording, right?”

Reed shook his head. “It only works in close proximity to whatever is receiving its transmissions, it has no capacity for storage in itself.” He looked thoughtful. “Which is a major design flaw—I wonder if perhaps our intrepid inventor needed that part of the droid they dismantled for something else.”

“Perhaps our rebel friend is is watching us, getting the lay of the land before he makes contact.” Sue picked the thing up and handed it to Reed. “Put it back where it was, and just watch what you say in the lab. To their eyes, it malfunctioned for a while, they’ll want to come check on it, and when they do, we’ll be ready.”

Reed nodded. “And if they are our rebellion friend?”

“Then we’ll have shown them that they’re right to trust us with the task ahead,” said Sue.

Reed touched her jaw, once, a small, gentle comfort, and slid quietly out of the apartments.

Johnny watched his sister making precise notes on her datapad, watched her face subtly change from absolute certainty to something softer, more troubled. “You okay?” he asked quietly.

She looked up at him, startled, like she’d forgotten he was there. “Yeah,” she said, and then, “well. You know.”

Johnny nodded, and waited.

“It’s all changing,” Sue said, the worry line between her brows deepening. “Even if that tracker is from our contact, even if the hand-off goes perfectly, even if somehow we manage to pull this off flawlessly, it’s not like we go back to being what we were before. The whole landscape has changed. The game we’re playing is a much more dangerous one than when I was first dealed in, you know?”

Johnny raised his eyebrows. “Are you scared?” It was almost impossible for him to imagine. Sue had always been—implacable, unflappable, had always been the kind of person that wouldn’t think twice about walking unarmed into a wampa cave if it had something she wanted.

Sue shook her head. “No,” she said, and then clarified: “Not for me.”

Relief washed over Johnny, leaving behind guilt in its wake—it wasn’t fair, but Sue had always anchored his own courage, and if hers should fail he had very little faith in his own. “What do you mean?”

“I’m an elected official, Johnny,” Sue reminded him. “More than myself, I represent our people. I don’t fear Osborne’s reprisals on me. I need to do this; I need to do everything within my power to stop the crumbling of this Republic that I believe in. If I die in the course of that, so be it.” She spread her hands against the table, pressing her fingers hard into the wood like she was trying to leave impressions behind. “But I am scared he’ll hurt them.”

Johnny reached out and took her hand, curling his fingers against her palm. “He won’t,” he said firmly. “We won’t let him.”

Sue smiled at him. It came in waves, like she was slow to believe him, but she got there, in the end, and that faith let Johnny maybe believe it himself. They sat there in the light of the slowly-reddening sun; the windows were at Johnny’s back and the light soaked in through his shirt, combining with Sue’s steady gaze to give him a kind of calm, a confidence he hadn’t felt for days, maybe weeks. He had a part to play in this. A small one, perhaps, for now, but the future was about to burst wide open in a way that was still terrifying but kind of a terrifying _opportunity._ Perhaps he could remake himself. Perhaps he could step out of Sue’s shadow. Perhaps this romance he’d been dreading could even be _fun._

He thought—briefly—about the guy from the speeder shop, his face almost but not quite right. He wanted to ask Sue to see the picture of Drake again so he could make sure but it felt stupid to stare at it and try to figure it out when he would be meeting the actual person soon, and anyway, what were the odds that he'd run into a super secret rebel spy in the speeder shop he worked at to feel useful when he was on-planet and Sue was busy with Senate stuff?

 _He knew who you were,_ a small voice in his brain said.

 _Your sister’s famous, idiot, a lot of people know who you are,_ he told it.

 _He said to expect to see him again,_ the voice said insistently.

 _Your sister’s famous,_ he told it again, firmer, _sometimes men in speeder shops are going to want to sleep with you about it._

 _We could let them,_ it said.

 _Shut up,_ he said, and then gave up on talking to himself in favor of the undeniably better conversationalist in the room.

“When are we supposed to meet this dude I’m taking to the ball?” he asked. It would help to banish that slightly crooked smile he’d probably never see again, actually being face to face with the mysterious rebel himself.

Sue shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, the frown reappearing between her brows. “Tonight, I think, but it’s in his hands, not ours.”

+

Peter frowned, messing with the transmitter in his ear. It had been working fine, giving him a pretty boring but clear channel into the labs, and then all of a sudden the voice he thought was probably Richards had gone silent, not answering even when directly addressed, and then everything had gone silent entirely. Had he been discovered? Had they switched his bug off?

He was tucked into an alleyway across the street from the labs, just inside the range of transmission, and he took a few steps out of cover to try and regain the signal. He realized his mistake almost immediately, the hair on the back of his neck and some instinct halfway between hearing and sight making him turn—but not fast enough, as the barrel of a blaster nudged up under his jaw.

Drake sort of looked like him, he supposed—the list of Fel'icia’s reasons to choose him for this job was fast-growing from where it started at “I trust you”—and he had a look in his eye that would have told Peter his blaster was unlikely to be set to stun even if he hadn’t already known the guy ran with Outer Rim terrorist bastards. “Who are you?” he asked, voice low. It was a surprisingly nice voice, even if he was trying to put a growl in it.

“I get it,” said Peter. “If the main thing you’re going for is brown eyes, brown hair, and a certain boyish charm, this checks out.”

Drake blinked. “What?” he asked, and before the end of the rise in his voice Peter had knocked the blaster out of his hand with a quick, hard strike of his palm and followed up with a kick to the knee, trying to make sure the guy couldn’t get away. He was faster than Peter expected, shifting backward out of the way of his heel, and rather than diving for the blaster he grabbed something from his hip and in another second snapped it outward—a telescoping stun stick. Peter circled him, wary, not sure whether to be grateful that he seemed to have no interest in running or worried about why he didn’t.

Drake swung at him—not wild, but still a little too telegraphed; Peter dodged, and dodged the second, swing, too. He stepped inside his reach, risking—and taking—a third, sidelong hit to the ribs, but kept moving through it, breathing through the sharp, shattering pain that spread from where the weapon hit him through his shoulder and hip on his left side and managing to wrap an arm over Drake’s and snap it sharply down against his knee, forcing him to drop the stick and drawing an absolutely agonizing popping sound from the joint of his shoulder.

Drake didn’t scream—he was too much of a professional for that—but he made a choked, whining sort of noise and tried to break free of Peter’s grasp, his other arm coming up and glancing across Peter’s temple in a clumsy blow that still left his head ringing.

Peter resisted his instinct to throw the guy into a building, reminding himself this was neither one of his opponents in the ring nor a Hutt tough accosting him in the street. Instead he hit him once, pulling his blow, in the gut; then he dropped him, kneeled on his probably-dislocated shoulder, and hit him once again across the face.

The guy stopped moving. Peter did a cursory check to see if he was breathing and then went through his pockets.

It was easy enough to find the guy’s ship with the locator on his data pad— presumably in case of a quick getaway he’d left it in an alleyway a few blocks away and the key code was only secured with his fingerprint. He slung the guy over his shoulder.

Once he was in it was only a matter of dropping Drake off in his bunk, making sure there was a few weeks worth of food in the little kitchen/lounge area—it was a pretty sweet little ship, clearly meant for long-term space living—and laying in a particular set of coordinates, including a little trick at the end to buy himself some time. It wouldn’t hold forever, Drake no doubt had terrorist allies who would come retrieve him if he couldn’t figure it out himself, but hopefully Peter would be long gone by then with no one the wiser and whatever revenge they brought down would be the Storms’ problem, not his.

He checked one last time that he hadn’t hit the guy too hard—dropping a stranded terrorist in a Senator’s lap was one thing, but dropping a _dead_ terrorist was another entirely--and then let himself out.

By the time he got back to the lab, there was a group of four people waiting for him. He saw them before they saw him, and he hung back, looking them over.

He saw Johnny--both more and even better dressed than he’d been in the speeder shop, fine, tailored clothes in white and blue clearly meant to mark him as of a piece with his sister, who was standing next to him, her blonde hair swept upward in a style somehow both simple and complex at once, her left arm hidden by one-shoulder cape trimmed in gold.

Next to her was a tall, slim man with just the slightest peppering of white at his temples. Judging from his practical greys Peter assumed he was one of the scientists from the lab, and judging from his proximity to Senator Storm and the way he laid a hand on her shoulder he guessed it was Richards.

The biggest of them—clearly the muscle—was a member of some sort of rocky species Peter had never encountered before. He stood almost eight feet tall, to Peter’s eye, and hulking, but the others had no fear or even discomfort in their body language with him so close. As Peter watched he leaned over to Johnny, his stone-fissure mouth opening and closing as he spoke. Johnny scowled at him, punching him in the shoulder, and then made an over-the-top show of shaking out a faux-injured hand.

Peter frowned. They didn’t seem like terrorist collaborators. They seemed like a family. He was tempted for a moment just to keep watching them until they went away, indulge himself in memory and loss and give the whole thing up as needless and complex and too political for him.

Except—then what? Go back to Nar Shadaa, to _his_ family, to May, empty handed? Go back to find his reputation ruined, again, Fel'icia furious so no other sources of work, with her people and Zittoun’s people and possibly now Drake’s people out for his blood in a galaxy apparently on the brink of either totalitarianism or war?

He shook himself, pushing memory and suspicion both back, and stepped out of the shadows.

Johnny noticed him first. Peter was grateful for that, because it meant he didn’t have to figure out how your were supposed to greet a Senator. He could just raise a hand in a little wave, give Johnny a mostly-sincere grin, and say, “hey, long time no see.”

Johnny blinked at him, then blinked again, and for a second Peter thought he’d completely botched the whole thing, that he’d made no impression at all in the shop and Johnny had no idea who he was. It was surprisingly dismaying thought, and not just because he’d have to do all the work of setting up his hooks again.

“This is what you were talking about?” Johnny finally demanded. “The job where you get your hands dirty?”

“Sorry, kid,” said Peter, his relief making him cocky. “I didn’t realize you were you, I didn’t exactly expect to find the brother of the Alderaanian Senator in a random Coruscant speeder shop.”

It was a lie, sort of, but he figured there was no harm in letting these people underestimate his intelligence.

“Kid,” Johnny said, and rolled his eyes. “There’s no way you’re anything more than a few months older than me, if that.”

Peter looked him up and down, not bothering to hide the motion. “There’s age as in time lived and there’s age as in things experienced,” he said, “I’ll just leave it at that.”

There was a low grinding sound as their alien friend ran his stony fingers over his equally stony skull. “Rebels sent a real charmer.”

Peter pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.” _I just narrowly avoided getting a concussion because the actual charmer they sent was a fair hand with a stun stick._ “This isn’t going the way I imagined it.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Johnny muttered, but the line of his shoulders had softened. Peter got the feeling he was the kind that got angry quick but burned out just as fast. Good. Much easier to deal with than quiet, deep resentment that lingered and then popped up unexpectedly. He should know.

“Let’s try this again, shall we?” Peter said. He straightened his shirt, ran a hand through his hair to make it slightly less of a disaster, and held out a hand.

Johnny, looking wary, took it.

“Bobby Drake,” said Peter, “but on-planet you can call me Peter.” He brought Johnny’s hand up to his lips, flicking his eyes up to meet Johnny’s startled gaze. “I would be absolutely honored if you would allow me to accompany you to the Galactic Republic Gala.”

The widening of Johnny’s eyes was very, very slight before he rolled them but it was there, and it was enough for Peter to smile, secretly pleased at the way he took back his hand rather than finding it frustrating.

“Fine,” Johnny said, without heat, and crossed his arms. “Anything for the greater good, right?” He looked to his sister. “So what’s the plan?”

+

The plan, it turned out, was deceptively simple. Reed had arranged that only himself and Victor, as senior members of the research team, would be present backstage at the unveiling. At some point during the evening, before Senator Osborn arrived to actually, well, un-veil, Reed would distract or otherwise incapacitate Victor, steal the prototype, and hand it off to either Sue or Johnny and then Robert— _Peter_ —would slip out with it and away to his people on Denusia.

The first place where Johnny saw the sticking point, of course, was the part where 100 pounds when soaking wet Reed was going to incapacitate Victor von Doom, a man Johnny had once personally witnessed throw a table saw across an empty laboratory in rage. With his _arms._ That wasn’t even taking into account what he could do with his Jedi-trained mind. But every time he tried to bring this up Reed just insisted “I’ll _talk_ with him,” and Sue pinched her lips together in a gesture that meant _worried_ but also meant _now is not the time to talk about this_.

The second place where Johnny saw the sticking point was, well, Peter. Spending two weeks with Peter, bonding and planning and “stuff.” Attending the Republic Gala, where he would see everyone he’d ever met and hated, with Peter.

It wasn’t that he was unattractive. Now that he was reconciling them into the same man he could admit that he looked much better in the flesh than he had on even Sue’s very advanced hologram. His eyes were warmer, his eyebrows darker, all the lines of his face sharper and more striking. Johnny wondered if it had been a few years since the picture was taken; it looked like the break in his nose had either been healed or broken again the other way, and there was a new split in his eyebrow. Very new, based on the not-yet-healed pink of the scar.

But there was something about him, the way he carried himself, a slight edge to his words, that was pissing Johnny off. It wasn’t _what_ he said; he’d quite enjoyed the flirting they’d done in the speeder shop before he figured out who he was. But. Maybe it was Peter continuing to call him _kid._ Maybe it was the way he listened to everything anyone said to him with a slightly sardonic, sideways sort of face, like he was taking it in but wanted to make sure you knew he was forming his own opinions about it.

“Hey,” said Peter, startling Johnny out of thinking about him and making him actually meet his eyes. “You wanna get a drink?”

“Oh,” said Johnny. “Sure.”

Or maybe it was that this stranger, this outsider to Coruscant, to the Senate, to the family, had slipped into their close-knit tight-lipped plan and taken control of Johnny’s role of it so completely that he felt even more like nothing but a pretty face.

“Cool,” said Peter. “You’re gonna have to tell me where, because I have no idea what I’m doing around here.”

It sounded like the truth but it was so counter to what Johnny had been thinking about mere split seconds before that it tripped him up, and he said nothing, just awkwardly leading Peter out through the door.

They passed through Sue’s strange sound-dampening bubble—Johnny was used to its quick-submerge feeling by now, but Peter stopped dead, his head on one side. “What was _that?_ ”

Johnny stopped, too, turning on the stairs to look at him. “Oh, right,” he said. “Sue, she’s been learning the Force, and she’s got this thing she does where she makes, like, a bubble around her apartments so no one can—”

Peter held up a hand, frowning. “I’m sorry, I gotta stop you there. If you don’t want to tell me the truth you don’t have to, but at least respect me enough not to use fairy tales as your cover story.” He glanced around. “What, you got sound-dampeners in the walls that make an electrical field, or…” he trailed off.

Johnny stared at him. “Sorry,” he said, “what? Are—are you saying you don’t believe in the Force?”

Peter made a face at him. “Uh, yeah, I’m not five. I was gonna stop calling you _kid_ since you seemed to hate it so much but now I’m not so sure.”

“Peter,” said Johnny slowly. “The Force is real. You just felt it be real. The Jedi are real, I _personally know_ multiple people on the Jedi Council, what are you talking about—”

“Everyone knows those guys made up their magic powers so no one would try to reverse engineer their lightsabers and gravity boots and, whatever else, psychic suggestion drugs,” Peter scoffed. “And even if it were real, having a secret bubble around your apartment that makes anybody who walks by feel like they’re coming up for air while swimming doesn’t seem like particularly useful spycraft to me.”

“Oh,” said Johnny, broken out of the absolute ridiculousness of the first half of his tirade by the actually pretty good point in the second. Surely if Reed could feel it he would have said something. He thought back. He’d never actually mentioned the bubble to either of them, or to Ben, for that matter. “Maybe—maybe only certain people can feel it? Maybe only if you’re Force sensitive or whatever, I’m not but if Sue’s got it we’re—we’re pretty genetically similar—”

Peter still looked deeply skeptical. “That would mean I’m “Force sensitive,” too, whatever that means, and I definitely don’t have any fancy magic powers.”

“You do know it takes training,” Johnny said. “You don’t just wake up one day with powers.”

“No,” Peter said, continuing up the stairs past him. “I don’t know that. I don’t know basically anything about the Force, because, again, I’m not five.”

Johnny jogged up the stairs after him, cutting him off at the door to the roof. “You’re really serious about this. You don’t believe in the Force.”

Peter sighed, squinting up at him. “Look. The only thing I’ve ever seen a Jedi do was cut down a bunch of Hutt bullies in a ridiculously short time, and I’m just saying if you gave _me_ a fancy laser sword I’m pretty sure I could do the same.”

Johnny had the unfortunate suspicion he was right. “Not everyone can use a lightsaber,” he said lamely. “They—have to like you, I think.”

Peter’s eyebrows twitched together. “Who does, the Jedi Council?”

Johnny shook his head, wishing he hadn’t started down this path. “The lightsabers.”

Peter blinked at him. “The weapons. Have to like you.”

Johnny licked his lips. “The crystals inside, they’re alive? And I think in order to wield a lightsaber properly they have to, like, accept you.”

Peter was staring at him like he’d grown another head. “Who _told_ you this crap?”

Johnny gave up and opened the door out onto the park. “Prince N’Mor.”

Peter slid past him, giving him a sideways look. “The same Prince N’Mor you tried to tell me was having an affair with your sister.”

Johnny happily seized on his slightly less embarrassing topic, even if it was only slightly. “I was trying to divert attention away from the fact he’s been teaching her Force stuff,” he explained.

“And maybe distance her from Richards, too, right?” Peter asked. “It was a good thought. If I’d been who I said I was, it would probably have worked.” He was walking very close to Johnny, probably so they could keep their voices down. “Of course, now that I’ve seen him and your sister in the same room, I’d never believe it.” He paused, and then said thoughtfully, “unless they’re both involved.”

“Both?” asked Johnny, and then realized what he meant. “You mean both Reed and Sue, with N’Mor?” He shook his head. “He wishes, he’s been hanging around Sue basically since they both started out in the Senate.”

He lead Peter down the sidewalk bordering the park and down a long white spiral staircase stretching from level 5127, where the Senatorial apartments and meeting hall was, down to 5126, which was mostly upscale restaurants, bars, and gaming halls. The next level down was the offices of secretaries, assistants, and lawyers, and below that residences for anyone working in government, and then another layer of shops and dining establishments. It was weird, knowing there were so many layers of Coruscant that he’d never seen, weird to be around but not really a part of the upper echelons of society, literally perched atop those less fortunate.

But it wasn’t something he had any say over, and as Sue often put it, you fight the enemy you can see first, and then you widen your field of vision. Not that she nor perhaps anyone was going to be able to fix the inequality problems on Coruscant after this mission was done.

As they descended the long staircase his eyes and his mind drifted back to Peter, or Robert, or whatever his real name was. It wasn’t hard to imagine him engaging in faraway space battles, or destroying property in righteous resistance of Osborne’s growing power. There was an energy to him, a magnetism that didn’t come through at all through the hologram. He tried to remember what his usual cover story was, what he’d read in the file. Something boring, he thought. Not the courier work he’d claimed in the speeder shop.

Without really thinking about it he took Peter to a bar he used to frequent when he would come here with Alicia—with Lyja, and then also afterward, when he was on-planet, because exposure therapy was the only kind of therapy worth pursuing, and he refused to let her stand in the way of the convenience of it. The bartender, a Devaronian woman with her horns left defiantly long,  gave him a slightly surprised nod.

Peter ordered the first thing on the menu, barely looking at it, and then chose a nearby table for them, mockingly pulling out Johnny’s chair for him. Johnny gave him an unimpressed look, but sat, waiting til Peter had, too, before he spoke.

“So I read the files you sent over with the hologram, your cover story and stuff,” he said.

Peter’s shoulders tensed, just a little, and then relaxed. “Yeah?”

Johnny nodded, lowering his voice. “The stuff you do, sabotaging shipments, stopping trade deals, stealing components, that's not exactly lucrative, right? You have a day job, at least on paper?

Peter nodded. “Yeah. I’m an accountant on Denusia when I’m not being called in.  It’s more than a cover story, it’s a day job. We’ll, uh, sometimes take materials from shipments, but almost everything’s serial-numbered and too easy to track to resell. If you think hijacking a shipment of Vulca minerals is hard, try filing taxes for someone who has three heads, each with their own job.” He smirked. “That’s the real terrorism, you know. Tax law.”

Johnny frowned a little at the choice of words. “Do people actually believe that?”

“What, that i'm an accountant? Why wouldn’t they?”

Johnny shrugged. “You don’t look like you’d be good at math.”

Peter stared at him, and then his eyes crinkled up and he gave a disbelieving shout of laughter. It transformed his face, the laughter, made him for maybe the first time just seem like. A guy. Not someone holding himself above Johnny, not some operative behind a wall. “What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“You don’t!” Johnny protested, “you’re—you know, the scars, and. Muscles.” He winced at himself.

That, for whatever reason, sobered Peter. “Hey, if I could be as strong as I am and have survived as long as I have without the scars and muscles, trust me, I would.”

Johnny blinked at him. “You want to be _less_ buff.”

“‘Course,” said Peter. He squinted at Johnny, like he was trying to figure out how much to tell him. “I’m not _just_ an accountant. Life’s pretty shit for a lot of us out there, and I’ve dipped a toe into professional fighting now and again, and in those circles, the more I look—” he smirked, “well, like I’m good at math, the more money I make when I beat up the bigger guy.”

Johnny shook his head. “But.” _You’re hot,_ he almost said. _Don’t you care about being hot?_ He resisted the urge to hit himself in the face. Not only would that be hideously forward for this decidedly fake date, it would also pretty firmly mark him as exactly as empty-headed as Peter probably assumed he was. “Sorry, it’s just—I’m trying to fit all these different pieces of who you are into, you know, the guy sitting in front of me.”

Peter sipped his drink, maybe the first sip he’d taken. He seemed a little out of place here—there was a nervousness to his movements, like he was resisting the urge to look over his shoulder every five minutes—but Johnny was pretty sure that wasn’t the only thing up. “You don’t like it?”

Peter shrugged. “I don’t really drink much.”

Johnny watched his face, curious. “This was your idea.”

Peter shrugged again. “Well—I don’t know. It seemed like an easy first step, you know? A classic first date.”

Johnny grinned at him despite himself. “Surprised you didn’t choose a holovid.”

Peter’s eyebrows shot up. “I know I came on a little strong in the speeder shop, but surely that’s more fourth date territory for a classy Alderaanian boy like you.”

Johnny blinked at him, baffled. “What do you mean?”

Peter opened his mouth, and then closed it again. “I—ah. Oh.” He rubbed the back of his neck, clearly embarrassed. “Okay, so—for a lot of people, in a lot of places that you’ve probably never been and hopefully never will be, most holovid theatres don’t exactly show your run of the mill, family-friendly fare, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh,” said Johnny, less mortified than he probably should have been after accidentally sort of suggesting he and his fake date slash new friend watch porn together. “Wait, are you telling me you’ve never been to a holovid theatre?”

Peter quirked his mouth at him. “That’s not exactly what I’m telling you, no.”

Johnny felt himself flush. “I mean a real one,” he explained. “Less nudity, more grand epics about little people beating great odds to save the ones they love, etc. etc.”

“Isn’t that depressing?” Peter asked “Having that dangled in front of your face when that’s not how it actually works?”

Johnny had no response for that. “Dark,” he muttered.

Peter took another sip of his drink. “Sorry,” he said, wincing. “This is maybe why I don’t drink very much.”

Johnny sucked his lower lip into his mouth and made a decision. “So let’s not,” he said, and stood up, holding out a hand. “C’mon.”

Peter blinked up at him. “What?”

“You’re clearly miserable in here,” Johnny said. “I don’t have much interest in getting to know you under conditions that make you miserable, so let’s change the conditions.” He jerked his head toward the door. “Let’s go.”

Peter hesitated. For a second Johnny thought about retracting his hand, letting him stand up in his own time and maintain a professional—if professional was even the right word—distance. But kriff it, the gesture had already been made, and the point was to be seen together, right, before the gala as well as during, so the Capitol would be abuzz with this new hottie he was seeing and no one would cry spy in their wake.

Peter took his hand, and let Johnny make an entirely cursory show of helping him to his feet, judging by the effortless strength he’d displayed at Silenia’s. Johnny drained the rest of his own glass and started pulling him out of the bar, but he lingered, protesting. “Don’t you have to pay—”

Johnny waved a hand, continuing to tow him out. “She saw me come in, I’ve got a running tab.”

Peter stepped up beside him once they were out on the boulevard, slowly—that little voice in Johnny head treacherously substituted _lingeringly_ —letting go of his hand. “You bring dates there often, huh?”

Johnny squinted at the stars, not looking at him, hoping that the immediate, panicky sinking of his heart didn’t show on his face. “Not really,” he said tightly. “Not anymore.”

“Oh,” said Peter, “sorry, did I—”

Johnny shook his head sharply, and Peter fell silent.

“It’s fine,” Johnny said after a bit, because it seemed called for.

“Not my business,” replied Peter, correctly, but it sat between them, a transparisteel wall that someone had just tapped on, making it ring, reminding them both it was there.

“You ever wish you could fly?” Johnny asked, suddenly, because being surrounded by velvet sky and pinprick stars made him kind of one-note, and it was a safe, first-date sort of note, even if it was also the thing at the core of his being. “I don’t mean in a speeder or in a ship but just you, and the sky.”

Peter was quiet for a second, and then he said, “sometimes, yeah.” He made a sound like a sort of half laugh, half sigh. “Mostly because I trust my body way more than I trust a speeder, or anything that’s not—” he gestured to himself vaguely. “You know, my own bits.”

Johnny nodded. “I love anything that gets me—” he gestured upward, “—out there, but there’s something different about being completely surrounded by sky. When I was a teenager I used to have this pair of rocket boots—wore the things to _death_ zooming around Alderaan, I was basically a public menace.”

When he glanced at Peter he was surprised to find him smiling, just faintly, an afterthought of an expression, less in the mouth than it was in the eyes. “What happened to them?”

“I literally wore them out,” Johnny said. “Tried to fix ‘em but they were an older model and I couldn’t get the parts.”

Peter looked confused. “So buy new ones. Isn’t that how being rich works?”

Johnny shook his head. “We weren’t—exactly rich, back then,” he said, and then, quickly, so Peter wouldn’t misunderstand, “I mean I think in a lot of contexts, to a lot of people we were still rich, we never really worried about food or shelter or anything, but we weren’t really _new rocket boots_ rich, and anyway, by that time Sue was running for office and I had to be, you know. Dignified.”

Peter snorted, shaking his head.

Johnny knocked his shoulder with his own. “What?”

“It’s just so weird to imagine having a job description that includes “being dignified”,” Peter said, putting it in heavy air quotes. “How do you stand it?”

Johnny sighed, throwing some overblown angst into it. “It’s a trial, I must say.” He leaned dramatically backwards against a nearby lamp-post, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead. “The dinners. The conversations. The _old people._ ”

Peter laughed at him, stepping up into the circle of light cast by the lamp. He had his hands in the pockets of his jacket, the wind shifting through his hair, and when Johnny straightened up they were just a little bit too close.

“No, but really,” Peter said, not moving away. “Forget your sister, just for a sec, forget everything else. If you could be anything in the galaxy, what would you be?”

Johnny took a breath. The wind had picked up, and he felt it rush into his lungs, too-quick, heady. “Now who’s buying into holovid fantasies?”

Peter licked his lips. “A whole lot’s about to change, is what I hear,” he said. “Why not you?”

Johnny swallowed, feeling almost pinned to the lamp post by the look in Peter’s eyes. “I—I’d be flying,” he said honestly. “I’d have my own ship, nothing fancy, but something that’s mine, and I’d be out there, not—worried about being dignified or caring what various political factions thought of me. Caring about the stuff that matters. Doing stuff that matters.”

He almost expected Peter to press him for more, ask him what he meant, but after a strange, hanging moment he just nodded and turned, releasing Johnny from his spell and staring out at the sky. Johnny relaxed, enough that it made him jump a little when Peter said, abrupt, “you should take me flying.”

“I, uh, what?” said Johnny, intelligently.

Peter didn’t turn, just looked at him sideways, the corner of his mouth turning up. “For our second date.” He reached out and touched Johnny on the chin, something like a comradely chuck except slower— _lingering—_ and then dropped his hand. “Change the conditions, like you said.”

“Right,” said Johnny, his heart beating weirdly fast.

“Goodnight,” said Peter, and walked away.

Johnny stayed where he was, feeling strangely but not entirely unpleasantly small. “Right,” he said again, to the dark.

+

Peter had assumed he would just be sleeping in his borrowed ship, but Sue had insisted on providing him with a guest room, separated from her apartments by a discreet hallway and small staircase. He assumed the lock codes were changed regularly, or she wouldn’t trust a stranger with them, but there was still a warmth to her, to all of them, that kept throwing him. A sweetness in her interactions with Reed, an earnest naivete to Johnny’s answer to his question— _doing stuff that matters,_ he’d said. That answer—in fact, everything about their sort-of first date tonight—had just piled up on top of the doubts Peter already had about Fel’icia’s story, the complicity she’d lain at the Storm/Richards gang’s feet.

It was possible the file on Drake that Johnny had seen was doctored, obscuring the worst of his and the terrorist’s actions. It was possible they were being duped.

He tried to convince himself it didn’t matter, that he was just here to do the job, but made a mental note to look more into the Denusians, see if there was anything illuminating on the data pad he’d borrowed from the unconscious Drake, and wandered through the little sitting room to the bedroom, kicking off his pants and throwing himself face down onto the bed with a sigh.

It was too damn big. The bed, the whole place; too big and too white and too gold and too empty. He missed May. He didn’t miss Nar Shadaa—he wasn’t _insane—_ but he missed the feeling of knowing who and where he was, of fitting comfortably into a moving machine of living beings all of whom were trudging along spitting into the teeth of life just like he was. It felt wrong, being dipped into this clean world, just for a second, specifically for the purposes of lying to everyone he met.

He missed knowing people, and being known. He missed, stupidly, Fel’icia. There had been a moment, before he watched her briefing, where he thought she might join him on this job, that they might take a jaunt across the Core together. It would have been a bad idea, he told himself now, but it was hard to believe; after all, before they were bad for each other they’d been really, really good, and it was difficult not to imagine going back to his borrowed ship and finding her there, in nothing but the stupid cape she so clearly wanted him to wear. Leaning back in his bunk, baring her throat to him, inviting him into the familiar warmth of her arms.

He flipped over on his back, shrugging out of his shirt, and thought of Fel’icia’s deadly nails on his skin. It’d been so long. Not just with her, but with anyone; he pushed himself to generalize the fantasy. If he spent this whole mission remembering when things were good he’d go back home and fall right back in with her, he _knew_ himself, they did this dance every few years and would probably never stop. He ran a hand over ribs that still ached from Drake’s stun stick and called on thoughts of other lovers: Bette, his first real girlfriend, and the clever, exploratory way she would kiss him; MJ, the gorgeous Devaronian with whom he’d spent a glorious, sweaty summer before she’d vanished, leaving him hungry and wanting for years afterward. G’wen,  Cizsy, J0y—others, less distinct, less lasting, the memory of their mouths and hands and wanting eyes pulling the path of his hand lower.

There had been men, too. Peter’s tastes generally ran toward women, but certainly not exclusively—a classmate from the mess of outdated data, star charts and verbal abuse that had served him for a school, remembered now only as a click of teeth against his and hasty, calloused hands. A Chiss mechanic on Phindar, drawling and delighted by Peter’s unexpected strength. Peter palmed himself through his underwear, sucking in a breath. The memories of male partners were felt somehow more present for him tonight, and he stayed there, remembered pressing the mechanic back against a hanger-bay wall, cutting him off with his mouth in the middle of him describing what was wrong with the engines on—

 _Oh._ Peter paused in the process of slipping his hand into his waistband. _Of course._

He closed his eyes. _This is a bad idea,_ he told himself, thinking about how Johnny had looked, backed up against the lamp post on the wide-open promenade outside. The light had pooled in the curves of him—the lower line of his lashes, the hollow of his throat, the bow of his full lips, a golden figure so of a piece with this pristine elevated world but oh, a piece that Peter could ruin. _Don’t make this any worse than it already is,_ he said, wrapping a hand around himself and arching, his heels digging into the too-soft mattress beneath him. He imagined— _stop that—_ stepping up into Johnny’s space, imagined licking into his mouth, imagined pushing him down, a hand in his hair. His breathing was harsh, loud in the too-quiet room. He should stop—he should think about anything else—but the adrenaline and exhaustion and frustration of the day were mixing up and making it almost impossible for him to do anything but give in, ride out this feeling, the loose grip of his fist and the imagined bob of Johnny’s head, the softness of his mouth and the roughness of Peter’s own callouses. He clenched his jaw hard when he came, shaking, limp, feeling better and worse all at once.

He ran his clean hand across his face. “Well,” he said, to no one. “Kriff.”

It took them a while to get to that second date. Despite the basic simplicity of the plan, there was actually a lot to talk about: how to foil or otherwise get past being caught on any of the Gala security cameras, who to make nice with so as not to raise suspicions in the crowd, and—perhaps most importantly—how to find out if Reed had, against all odds, actually talked his lab partner into surrendering the prototype and was ready for them to pick it up from him.

Thankfully, it seemed Peter—in a genius move, considering he didn’t know he was doing it—had solved that last problem for them.

Reed dropped the little transmitter on the table between them. “This is yours?”

They were back in Sue’s quarters, in her living room/lounge that was larger than Peter’s entire apartment. There was a small waterfall built into one wall, with pretty zip fish, and a caf bar, at which Johnny was currently making some kind of fancy whipped Bantha-milk latte.

Peter picked up the transmitter, pleased. He’d figured he'd have to leave the thing behind. “You did find it! I thought you might have.”

Reed leaned forward. “It’s an especially fantastic design,” he said earnestly. “I've never seen anything quite like it, especially with the materials it's crafted from. Johnny was especially impressed--”

Johnny, from behind the bar, squawked. “I was _not—”_

Reed looked amused and continued, unperturbed, “—with the way that it rebalances, should it be knocked into.”

“Oh yeah?” Peter picked the thing up, weighing it in his palm, and glanced over, catching Johnny’s eye. “Watch this.”

He flung the transmitter at the nearest wall, careful not to throw it too hard. It tumbled over in the air, and he could see the little gravity-detector flip on, a faint bluish glow, and then it turned itself, hitting the wall with its little legs first and immediately digging in to cling, secure.

Reed let out a low whistle. “The BB line are amazing machines,” he said. “Their unique round design means they have to be able to detect the shape of a space whether there’s gravity or not, and immediately adapt to gravity should it suddenly appear.” He propped his chin on his hand. “Can I ask why the short range of efficacy and lack of internal storage?”

Peter grimaced. “I needed those parts for something else, and I only had one droid.”

Reed shook his head. “It’s a real shame,” he said. “Handicaps the whole design, that someone could just—either accidentally or intentionally—walk away with it, and it completely stops working. Plus, you have no way of finding it again if it stops transmitting outside of the vicinity of the receiver.” He looked pensive. “After this, if you would allow me to take a look, see whether, with my greater resources—”

“How’s this,” Peter interrupted. “After this, you let me access to your greater resources, and we see what we can do.” He coughed, suddenly aware of both of their assumptions that there would be any contact after this—and, lesser, their assumption that Reed still would have resources that even he could call on. “Anyway.  I have a solution for that last part already, at least.” He reached into his jacket pocket, sorting through his brass knuckles, the data cylinder from Fel’Icia, and brought out the receiver. Not the earpiece, but the one equipped with mini-speakers. He flipped a switch on the end, and a tiny display on the side lit up, just a simple row of numbers.

Reed cocked his head, frowning at it. “Coordinates?”

Johnny came out from behind the bar to examine them. “That’s here,” he said, at the same time as Reed.

Peter grinned at them. “That’s right. And if you’d left the bug at your lab, it would be showing the coordinates there.” He clicked the switch again so the display disappeared. “There’s not enough power in the thing to maintain sending sound over long distances, and not enough storage capacity to store any kind of useful bites. But there’s just enough of each for the little guy to know itself, and to tell me where it is when I ask.”

Reed’s eyebrows were almost lost in his hair. “What’s the range on that tracker?”

Peter shrugged. “Works from orbit to find it planet-side, haven’t tested it beyond that.” He crossed to pick the bug off the wall, squeezing its sides so its little legs retracted. He wandered over to drop it in Johnny’s hands.

Johnny stared down at it. “Reed calls me especially impressed, but he said the skill you showed in making this is _remarkable_.” His voice was quiet, as if not wanting Reed to overhear, and he looked up at Peter, eyes serious. “He doesn’t throw around words like that lightly.”

Peter raised an eyebrow at him. “Consider me flattered,” he said, matching his quiet tone, and found it was actually true. Reed was brilliant; that was clear within five seconds of meeting him. He wondered what kept him here, doing grunt work for the Republic engineering corps rather than making his fortune inventing the next luxury gadget to sell to the noble houses of new Mandalore or whatever.

“Hang on,” said Johnny. “You’ve only ever had one of these, and you’ve used it enough that you know it works from orbit? You’ve never lost it, ever?”

Peter cracked his neck. “Some of us are responsible with our toys, Mr. “Broken Rocket Boots” Storm.” He frowned. “Hey. Speaking of. Are we really banking on the idea that Osborne only has one of—whatever this weapon is? We take this prototype, what if he doesn’t even notice?”

Reed shook his head. “It’s not just stealing the prototype. It’s me disappearing with it, and Sue as well. I haven’t figured out everything about the weapon yet, but I’ve seen enough, and with the clips of what Victor’s been saying from your device...once we have the thing itself, it will be easy enough to reverse engineer it, and once we have we will know how to beat it.” He laid his long hands against the table and looked at Peter solemnly. “It has never been about wiping out his coup attempt all at once in one master stroke, Mr. Par Ker. It has always been about giving the resistance to it a fighting chance.”

This—seemed to call for some response from the nominal member of that resistance in the room. Peter swallowed. “I—we appreciate it.”

Reed smiled at him, slightly, sincerely, and Peter looked away. “Johnny,” he said. “Flying?”

Johnny blinked. “What?” he asked, as if surfacing from deep thought. “Right.” He gave a little bow in Peter’s direction and said mockingly, “Yes, sir.”

He tossed the bug back to Reed, while Peter tried desperately not to file that particular little soundbite away for later use.

+

It wasn’t that Johnny drove fast in order to freak out his passengers. His mean streak was pretty much contained to pranks, and his targets for pranks pretty much contained to Ben and a few old friends on Alderaan. But. Well, sometimes he got the wind in his teeth and it was hard to think about anything but the absolute freedom of speed.

“Is this—is this even legal?” Peter managed, peeling himself off the back of his seat enough to talk.

Johnny shot him an incredulous look. “ _You’re_ concerned with what’s legal?”

“I’m concerned with not getting noticed by any kind of authority, thank you very much,” Peter gasped as Johnny swirled them up and around a gleaming glass spire.

Johnny couldn’t help it. He laughed, and kept laughing, feeling it snatched away by the wind. There was just something so deeply funny about the white-knuckled grip Peter had on the arms of his seat, the facade of unflappability entirely melting away in the face of the cornering and drifting Johnny was pulling.

Okay. So maybe he drove fast in order to freak out _this_ particular passenger.

He merged swiftly through the rush hour traffic from level 5126 to 5127, popping out the other side and skimming around a pod delivering depowered piloting droids. They were held on to the base of the transport with industrial magnets, their arms and legs dangling in the wind. Ahead of them, the parks above the Senatorial apartments came to a sloping, pointed end, jutting into the flow of traffic like the prow of a ship interrupting schools of fish. At the very tip, an orchestra was performing for a crowd of beautifully-dressed people. Johnny brought them sliding in close enough to see the batons in the hands of the Besalisk conductor, then skimming and twirling away, laughing, when he was given an affronted look by a woman in a very overcomplicated hat.

Peter shook his head at him. “You must have been an absolute menace in rocket boots.”

Johnny grinned. “If I were in rocket boots I would have stolen that hat.”

He kept going west, launched from the point of the park level, crossing a vast gap in both architecture and traffic. The apartments dropped off with the parks behind them, and below,  rising by itself from a field of much smaller buildings, was a mushroom-shaped structure of grey metal, windowless and smooth. The Republic Judiciary Central Detention Center, the maximum security prison for enemies of the state.

Peter peered over the edge of the speeder to stare at it, but said nothing. Johnny wondered suddenly if he had friends there, other thieves and saboteurs who had gotten caught, but there didn’t really seem like a polite way to ask.

A few more moments and they pulled up against a landing dock, the base of a set of golden stairs leading upward to an ornate golden pagoda. People—very, very rich people—held weddings and birthdays and acceptance speeches here, but today it was empty, a filigree birdcage for a pair of high-flying jokesters like them.

“This is the highest publicly-accessible point in the city,” Johnny said, stepping out of the speeder and, in what was becoming a running theme, offering Peter his hand.

Peter stayed where he was, hesitating. For a moment Johnny thought he was afraid of heights, but there was a different kind of gleam in his eye. “Publicly accessible?” he asked. “Not highest, period?”

“No, the highest in general is the tower they use for Jedi Council meetings,” Johnny said, confused.

Peter snorted. “They have an actual wizard tower?”

Johnny rolled his eyes, but not even Peter’s weird Force beliefs were going to ruin his first good mood in months. “It’s not a _wizard tower,_ ” he said, “it’s just a tower where all the wizards meet.”

Peter laughed at him, brown eyes sparkling, and still didn’t step off the speeder.

Johnny bit his lip and stepped back into it with him. “I thought you were the one worried about attracting attention.”

Peter shrugged. “Don’t you have, like, diplomatic immunity?” he asked. “Besides, it’s after hours. Nobody’ll be around. They need their rest for all their fake magic. ”

Johnny shook his head. “Remind me to ask Sue to float some stuff around for you later, this is ridiculous. Also, that’s definitely not how diplomatic immunity works.” He slid back down into his seat.

Peter followed suit. “I’m starting to feel like I could watch your sister walk on water and it wouldn’t necessarily convince me to believe in the power of the Force,” he said. “Just in the power of Sue.”

Sudden jealousy made Johnny’s hands twitch on the controls, but he turned it into a smooth, rising zigzag, sailing up through a pink-tinged bit of cloud and coming out in a world of golden, late-afternoon sun. “She has that effect on people,” he said lightly. “Pretty sure Reed almost proposed to her within five minutes of meeting.”

“How did they meet?” Peter asked, sounding genuinely curious.

Johnny slowed, skimming above the cloud cover in a wide, smooth arc, in no particular hurry to reach the tower and bring to end the excuse for this excursion. “Reed’s from Alderaan,” he said. “Sue met him in school—Victor, too. They’d never really been in the same circles, but had hung out a couple times, and I guess she’d really made an impression.”

 _And vice versa,_ he thought, remembering the way Sue had acted coming home from their singular sort-of date back then, drifting through their aunt’s house, her mind clearly far away from her body, the way she’d blushed and dismissed him when he’d pressed her on it.

“Before Reed settled down in the engineer corps he was sort of an adventurer type. Explorer, scientist, treasure hunter,” he continued. “He says it was all above board, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some smuggling in there, too.”

“Let me guess,” said Peter. “Sue was doing some kind of humanitarian work or something equally sickeningly good, they re-met on some grand adventure, saved each others’ lives. Love on an alien world.”

Johnny shook his head. “That’s more Ben and Reed, honestly,” he said. “Reed—well, apparently he’d never asked her on a second date because it would have been her birthday, and he couldn’t think of something good enough to give her. So he goes off adventuring, comes back four years later with a necklace crafted of four— _four_ —uncut fire rubies.”

He glanced at Peter, expecting to find him looking around at the clouds—this view was one of the reasons they were out here, after all—but instead found him looking back at him, his elbow propped on the side of the speeder, his hand in his hair. “And people say romance is dead.”

Johnny licked his lips and looked back to where he was going. “It’s pretty gross living in their laps and having to watch them be so successfully in love.” He grinned. “Also it’s _such_ an ugly necklace. I think Ben hangs on to it because he’s the least likely of us to get robbed, and Sue’s never going to wear the thing in a million years.”

Peter whistled. “You didn’t sell it? I assumed that’s how you all got from not buying new rocket boots rich to living in a literal ivory tower rich.”

Johnny shook his head. “It’s a sort of insurance policy,” he said. “A check which we might cash soon, actually, depending on.” He waved a hand. “You know.”

“Yeah,” said Peter quietly. “I know.”

The High Council tower was actually one of four towers surrounding the Temple Spire atop the Jedi Temple, which made the Spire itself the highest point, but there was “being willing to trespass on government slash possibly magical ground to impress your fake boyfriend” and then there was “being willing to trespass on the actual holiest ground to impress your fake boyfriend,” and Peter didn’t seem to mind when Johnny pulled up at the balcony outside the High Council rooms instead of trying to balance them atop the finned point of the Spire.

Any suspicions Johnny had about Peter being afraid of heights vanished as he immediately stood and hopped out of the speeder, peering through the balcony doors into the empty meeting chamber itself. “Huh,” he said. “I expected it to be—I don’t know, mistier.”

Johnny set his speeder to hover with the currents of the wind and joined him on the balcony. “Mistier?” he asked, confused.

“Yeah,” said Peter, “and like. More mystical.”

“They’re really just people,” Johnny said. “Like—priests, but priests who’ve learned to use, like, second-gravity, or electricity, or magnetism before anyone else.”

Peter fiddled with something at his belt, and then pulled on a pair of strange-looking gloves. He cracked his knuckles, gave the railing of the balcony and the transparisteel doors a critical glance, and then hopped up on the railing.

“Peter—” Johnny yelped as he swayed in the wind, and then watched as Peter ran a few short steps along the balcony, and jumped, throwing himself bodily at the doors, and—to Johnny’s disbelief—stuck. Like a spider, clinging to the transparisteel by his finger-tips.

“What,” said Johnny.”

Peter swarmed up the doors and hauled himself up over the lip above them to sit, feet dangling, on the gently-sloping roof of the tower. “You reminded me,” he called, and then wiggling his fingers at Johnny. “Magnetism.”

Johnny tried to laugh, but it came out a kind of explosive sigh. “You really weren’t kidding about the highest point.”

Peter patted the roof next to him. “C’mon, get up here.”

Johnny stared at him. “How?!”

Peter sighed and stood up, making Johnny clench his jaw so as not to yell at him again, and then slid down so he was leaning off the side of the roof, one hand anchoring his weight, the other extended downward to Johnny.

Johnny reached for it, dubious. “I don’t see how this is going to work—”

Peter ignored his hand, gripping him by the collar and picking him up bodily, one-handed and apparently absolutely effortless, and deposited him on the roof next to him.

Johnny’s mouth went dry. “Oh,” he said, and swallowed hard. “I, uh, forgot how freakishly strong you are.”

“My ancestors fought for generations against gravity,” Peter said, collapsing back down at his side. He smiled, small and real, and gestured around at the purpling sky. “I guess I’m doing the same.”

Johnny nodded. “Nice gloves,” he said. “More droid parts?”

Peter made a face. “Nah,” he said, “these I won off a guy who also forgot about my aforementioned freakish strength.”

Johnny shook his head at him, and then really, actually looked at the view. “Oh,” he said again. “Wow.”

The whole planet was spread out below them. It was like looking at a gorgeous, impossibly realistic map, the more than five thousand levels of vertical city reduced to a two-dimensional tapestry of flickering, swarming light. The noise, too, was different; at first all Johnny could hear was wind, but after a moment of concentration he could pick out a sort of musical, lilting buzz. Somewhere in that sound was the roar of hoverships, the laughter and cries and shouts of millions of people. Blaster-fire, babies wailing, water rushing, the orchestra they’d passed—every sound life was capable of making was a piece of that noise, every action life was capable of taking was somewhere below, caught by some angle of that endless, variable light.

“Peter,” Johnny breathed. “I—thank you.”

Peter made a surprised noise. “For what?”

Johnny didn’t look at him, not wanting to take his eyes off the city. “For this,” he said. “For—pushing me, making me do new things, for wanting to know me.” He licked his lips. “This whole thing could have been miserable, I—I expected it to be miserable. So. Thanks for not being an asshole.”

There was a short pause, and then Peter said, “don’t discount your first impression too much. I might still be an asshole.”

Johnny looked at him, finally, and found him leaning back on his elbows, staring up at the slowly emerging stars. He expected him to say more, but he was silent, and Johnny didn’t really know what to say, either, so he just lay back, picking out constellations with his gaze and waiting for—what? Peter to continue, to trust him with whatever _that_ meant when Johnny had given him no reason to at all?

“I’m glad,” Peter said finally. “It’s stupid of me, and maybe even just saying it confirms me as the asshole you think I’m not, but. I’m glad.” He rolled onto his side so he was looking at Johnny, his head propped up on his hand, and Johnny tried not to think about how close their bodies were, how he could almost feel the heat of Peter’s skin. “I’m glad I’m the one doing this job,” Peter said quietly, his eyes shifting over Johnny’s face, “and I’m glad to know you, Jonathan Storm.”

Johnny swallowed, hard. For an instant, so quick he might have imagined it, he thought he saw Peter’s eyes dip to his mouth.

And then Peter was pushing himself to his feet, abrupt. “We’d better get back,” he said. “Trespassing, and all.”

Johnny sat up, slower. “Yeah,” he said, feeling heavy. “Right.”

Peter slid off the roof with no hesitation at all, dropping down further along the balcony than where they’d come up, and Johnny followed him. He started making his way down, more tentative, he told himself, because he didn’t have the aid of Peter’s fancy magnet gloves, and then suddenly there were strong hands on his hips, lifting him out and away from the wall, and then he was on his feet, steadying himself against Peter’s chest.

“Thanks,” he said, rather stupidly, but Peter was already letting him go and stepping sideways, back toward the speeder. Johnny started to follow him, but stopped when Peter flung himself back against the wall next to the transparisteel doors, his attention suddenly entirely focused inside the meeting room.

Johnny dropped to a crouch, peering around his legs to see what he was looking at.

There was a figure standing in the center of the round room, dressed in a hooded, floor-length cloak of black velvet. As Johnny watched he reached up thin hands to lower the hood, revealing a narrow, disdainful sort of face and a distinctive widow’s peak of reddish-brown hair.

Johnny took a harsh breath. _Osborne._

Norman Osborne raised a hand, and the room around him came to life, a huge, rotating hologram of the universe appearing against the walls with Norman at its center. He shifted through it, pacing, reaching out to touch a planet here or a planet there, examining each with apparent interest.

Johnny stood. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

Peter was standing frozen, stock still, tension in the line of his shoulders, barely concealed anymore by the wall.

“Peter,” Johnny hissed, looking between him and Osborne. “Let’s just go.”

Peter stared through the transparisteel, his eyebrows twitched hard together.

“Peter!” Johnny hissed again, more urgently, and knocked into his shoulder.

Peter shook himself, breaking free of whatever had a hold on him, and followed Johnny back to the speeder, but Johnny could see him looking back over his shoulder as they fled away into the darkness.

“What was that?” Johnny asked, when they were far enough away not to be heard.

“I don’t know,” said Peter.

“That was Osborne,” Johnny said. “Like, the Osborne, the one we’re about to _rob._ ”

“I know,” said Peter.

“But what was he wearing?” Johnny demanded. “And why were you looking at him like that? Do you know him?”

“I don’t _know,_ ” said Peter again, frustrated, and when Johnny looked at him he was staring out at the darkness, his face turned away.

+

The next week or so was some of the slowest and most frustrating of Peter’s life. He’d never been good at waiting. In fact, if he had to list his skills from best to worst, waiting would be pretty damn close to the bottom of the list. It wasn’t that he didn’t have long-term goals, or didn’t understand delayed gratification; he just rarely had the means to actually meet the first, and rarely had time to indulge in the latter.

Sue and Reed were insistent on feeding and housing him until the deal was done but it felt wrong for food to be something that was purchased for him, for money to be something that belonged to someone else in some kind of endless supply, there if he needed it but past the barrier of the necessity of articulating that need. It felt like being reduced to a child again, and Peter found himself seeking outlets away from the white stucco honeycomb and long open parkways of the Senatorial district, taking his speeder or just walking on foot as far and as low as he could get, trying to find a street level where he could at the very least exchange a nod and a wave with an old woman sweeping her porch, maybe even witness a good, healthy mugging.

Every world has an underworld. Flying high and endless fields of stars might be where Johnny belonged, but you raise a man like he’s a rat and he’s going to feel safest in a hole, and the hole on Coruscant, he found, was very, very deep. He never reached the bottom—it would have taken months, probably; you could only take speeders down so low before visibility—and breathability—became impossible in the smog.

There was something insidious about a planet which was so overt but silent about its class-based caste system. On Nar Shadaa the whole planet was one mass of scum and villainy; here, they kept everything nice and separate, so the top bits of the planet could pretend they lived alone rather than above hundreds of levels of the poor and dying.

What he wanted to do most was go back to the High Council tower, prowl around there and see what he could see. He _knew_ he’d seen Osborne before, but why? Where? What business did the probable-next ruler of the galaxy have anywhere that a guy like Peter had ever been? And why was the final planet he had touched, after Endor, Alderaan, Kamino—why was he looking at Nar Shadaa?

But without the (albeit dubious) Senatorial protection of Johnny’s company, and without nearly his confidence in a speeder, it was a plan almost guaranteed to land him in that weird prison they’d flown over, the one that made Peter’s teeth hurt in a way he couldn’t understand. So he kept to the lower streets, making acquaintances with the people who ran food trucks and dive bars, gathering what little intelligence he could as a stranger who always arrived from above.

Once or twice it seemed like Johnny wanted to ask him where he disappeared to, but each time he would visibly but silently stop himself, remind himself it was none of his business. It always left a weird taste in Peter’s mouth, the sharp saliva of guilt. He found he had to pull himself up short the same way—work his way back through the layers of lies to the truth: they were friends; they weren’t friends, but they could be friends if Peter weren’t just a means to an end for Johnny and his family; they couldn’t be friends because Peter wasn’t even that, not really, not the way Johnny thought he was.

He went to Johnny’s rooms the night before the Gala. He didn’t really need to; they’d gone over the plan, at least every piece of it that could be planned beforehand, at great length. But what else was he supposed to do? Sit in his rooms and psych himself out?

Johnny let him in and wordlessly lead him to the balcony, as if trying to capture whatever breathless wonder they’d shared atop the High Council Tower. As if trying to anchor them in something that was them. Theirs. It was a nice gesture, even if it made Peter’s stomach turn to lead.

“So,” said Johnny, staring out at the city. “After tomorrow, this is all over.”

Peter raised his eyebrows. “Kind of seems like after tomorrow, this is just begun, the way Reed and your sister talk.”

Johnny crossed his arms, meeting Peter’s eyes. “Not what I meant.”

The line of his jaw was defiant, as if daring Peter to ask him what he did mean, but Peter didn’t have the strength for this kind of pretending, not on top of all the pretending he had to do already. He just nodded, settling back against the railing of the balcony.

“Then what?” Johnny asked.

“I go home,” Peter said firmly, honestly, with a pang of longing or maybe sorrow or maybe both.

Johnny nodded. “Back to Denusia?”

Peter shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, that’s not home.” He cleared his throat. Telling the truth felt like he was speaking through some kind of thick film. “ _Home_ is the ass-end of space, a rat-trap ecumenopolis called Nar Shadaa. Hutt-owned, Hutt-operated. I doubt you and Sue have much dealing with anyone from there.”

“So why go back?” Johnny asked.

Peter frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“If it’s so terrible, if you hate it there so much.” Johnny swept his fingers through his hair. “Why not just take what money you’re making at accounting, at the fights, and peace out?”

Peter shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “There are people there who rely on me, I’m not just a free agent who can go wherever.” He thought about the gang of kids living in the lowest rung of his apartment complex, the way they took his monthly gifts while furiously pretending they weren’t. He thought about his friend Harry at the gym where he trained, the bruises around his wrists, fading now—but only for as long as they could count on his asshole father being off-planet. He thought about May. “Running, buying myself out of that life and abandoning the people who can’t—that’s what they want. The Hutts, the other scum that really run the galaxy.  It’s how they got where they are, and they want you to think you can get where they are if you follow in their big slimy tracks. They want you to care about yourself at the expense of others, to believe in money as power and to only use that power for yourself.” Peter worked his tongue around in his mouth. “I did, once. I don’t plan to ever again.”

Johnny was silent for a long time. When Peter glanced at him, he was staring upward, watching the stars.

“Credit for your thoughts,” he said.

Johnny shook his head. “I was thinking that you remind me of my sister.”

Peter laughed, startled, and the laugh itself seemed to startle Johnny, too. “Romantic,” Peter said dryly.

Johnny shoved him. “I didn't mean it like that. Just.” He licked his lips. “Sometimes people shoulder whole planets.”

Peter leaned back on his hands. “Nah,” he said. “Couldn’t care less about the planet. Would blow the whole thing out of the sky if I could.” He picked a star and worked his way eastward, connecting new constellations with the invisible line of his gaze. “But the people, that's a different story.”

Johnny hummed. “I think for Sue those are the same thing.”

Peter smiled to himself. No wonder she was still Senator. “Guess I'm not so much like your sister after all.”

They were silent for a while, each lost in their own bubble of thought. Peter wanted—a lot of things, a lot of things that were a terrible idea.

“You know,” said Johnny, as if picking those wants from the air. “You could stay here.”

It wasn’t clear whether he meant here as in here on Coruscant after the Gala or here wherever Sue and Reed and Ben ended up or here as in in Johnny’s rooms, tonight, but hell, all of them were equally impossible. Peter suddenly needed to punch something. “No,” he said, as gently as he could, “I couldn’t.”

Johnny folded his lips into his mouth, hiding—disappointment, and something else, uglier, angrier, but it didn’t seem like anger at Peter.

Peter reached out to touch his arm. “Hey,” he said.

Johnny shook his head rapidly. “It’s fine,” he said. “I just.”

Peter licked his lips. _It’s not that I don’t want to stay,_ he could say. _It’s just that I need to rob you and deliver the stolen cargo to my ex-girlfriend so she can pay me what she owes me for ruining my livelihood._ Instead, he just said, “Johnny.”

“It’s fine,” Johnny repeated, firmer this time. “We go, we do the job, then we split, and you can go back to where people need you.”

 _Maybe—hopefully—not for long,_ Peter thought. Aloud he said, “You, too.”

Johnny licked his lips. “I don’t really think there’s anywhere where people need me,” he muttered.

Peter opened his mouth to ask what the hell _that_ meant, but Johnny was already ushering him out, muttering about needing his beauty sleep. Peter, moving backward, ducked through the rounded doorway out of his rooms and into the hallway. “Tomorrow?” he asked, unnecessarily.

“Tomorrow,” Johnny confirmed, and the door closed between them.

+

Johnny checked and rechecked the line of his jacket, squinting critically at himself in the mirror. It was, he told himself, entirely reasonable to be nervous about this. This was it, the mission, the drop, whatever other names they called it. If all went well there wouldn’t be any danger, and he and his family could take their time leaving, pack their things properly before boarding the transport to the moons of Iego that Sue had already booked them. But it was very possible all wouldn’t go well. Johnny eyed the pack at the end of his bed, essentials, ready to be slung over a shoulder at a moment’s notice.

Even if everything did go well, nothing would be the same after this. It was entirely reasonable to be nervous. Except he wasn’t just _my life as I know it is over and I have no idea what the future holds_ nervous. He was also _first date_ nervous. Which was in no way reasonable, for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that it was all a sham and ending with the fact if it hadn’t been a sham it would be their third date anyway.

He pushed his curls out of his face, tugging at the bags under his eyes, then grimaced at himself and stepped back. The suit was good, at least. He’d been thinking about things he would miss, moving away from the Core, living on the run, and the list was all in all pretty short, but Sue’s favorite tailor definitely made an appearance. He’d always gone with her colors and aesthetic at previous Galas—a kind of unspoken gesture of belonging, of loyalty and family, and she herself had stuck close to the traditional whites and blues and greys of Alderaanian royalty. He hadn’t—dispensed with that entirely, this time—the main colors were still blue and white—but he’d taken some liberties. It was his last hurrah, after all, his goddamn swan song.

The trousers and the back panel of the jacket were white, and there was silver trim on the collar and sleeves. The front panels, however, were a royal blue, with applique flames in turquoise and powder blue. On the back, between his shoulder-blades, was a stylized blue and turquoise sun, the rays of which curled up over his shoulders to almost touch the flames running up his chest.

“That,” said Peter’s voice from his doorway, “is the ugliest jacket I have ever seen in my life.”

Johnny’s gut twisted, a sudden spike in nerves as well as in anger. “Right,” he scoffed, turning on his heel, “because an Outer Rim weirdo like you knows good fashion when they see. It.”

He stopped talking. Peter was leaning against his doorway, arms crossed. He was wearing navy pants with a satin stripe up the outside that zig-zagged at his narrow hips, and a deep red shirt that fastened in such a way as to continue the zig-zag up over his abs and up his pecs to where it opened at his throat. Over it, fastening into the shirt itself with a tiny golden clasp, was a very stylish half-cape of the same navy as the trousers. His boots—deep grey, knee-high, with just enough of a heel that Johnny knew he’d have to look up to meet his eyes—were crossed at the ankle.

At Johnny’s silence he fidgeted with the clasp on the cape. “Is it too much?” he asked. “I really hate capes, but there wasn’t a jacket that really fit me right.”

Johnny unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “It’s good,” he said, crossing to him and batting his hand away to properly fasten the cape again, then shift higher and attach a tiny communicator badge to his collar to match his own. “It would be too simple without it.”

Peter’s hands settled on his shoulders. “Thanks,” he said. “I already look boring as dirt next to your, uh, statement, so I’ll take whatever I can get.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear your earlier remark and take that as a compliment,” Johnny said, not looking at his face. He stepped away from Peter’s hands and back to the mirror, checking the fall of his curls one last time.

They met Reed and Sue at the entrance to the main ballroom. They were talking in low voices, standing just a little more inside each others’ spaces than they would normally, looking just a little smaller. They greeted Johnny and Peter with nods, and then lined up in front of the doors, and then Reed offered Sue his arm with a tight smile, and Peter did the same for Johnny, his own smile small and amused, and then they were through the doors and submerged, entirely, into the Gala.

Sue hated these things, and for the first time ever Johnny understood why. He'd only ever attended with the express intention of getting drunk and chatting with the, like, four people he actually liked. Being here when he had more important things to think about, real things, was instantaneously overwhelming.

He was pretty much immediately accosted by one of the aforementioned four people, Crystalia Amaquelin of Gatalenta, who pulled him firmly away from Peter and into a corner to complain that her father hadn’t said a word to her mother all night and now her mother was on the warpath and it was really _disgraceful_ of him to be so late.

Johnny found he could barely listen to gossip that would have captivated him six months ago, instead his eyes wandering uneasily between the partygoers, trying to discern friend from foe on some imaginary criteria. If— _when—_ Osborne took over, who would stay? Who would fight? Who would flee?

“I swear, sometimes I envy you,” Crystal was saying. Her hair was almost as impressive as her mother’s tonight, tied up in gold and black ribbons like some kind of intricate metal beehive. “Your family—”

Johnny caught sight of a flash of silver and elbowed her. “Hey,” he said. “Pietro’s here.”

Crystal stopped in the middle of her sentence, following his gaze. “Kriff,” she muttered. “How do I look?”

“Gorgeous,” Johnny said, honestly. Her shimmering gold dress matched her hair exactly, and made the curves of her body into something architectural, statuesque.

She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Thanks, Johnny,” she said, and vanished off into the crowd.

He watched her go. “Goodbye, Crystal,” he said softly.

Across the room, Peter was accepting a drink from a burnished copper protocol droid. Johnny indulged himself in watching him, the unstudied grace in the lines of his body. He’d expected him to be as uneasy here as he was at the bar, but maybe the purpose of the night was calming him; Johnny watched the Twi’lek ambassador Liz’allen’anor slide up to him, the whole line of her body shouting ‘new blood!’ as loudly as if she’d been broadcasting it from the hovering speakers in every corner.

Peter raised an eyebrow at whatever she said to him, then laughed, his teeth flashing. Liz’allen touched his arm, sipping from her fizzing pink drink. Peter saluted her, and sipped from his own, leaning close to say something quiet.

“You don’t even drink,” Johnny muttered uncharitably, and shouldered his way through the crowd.

Peter glanced at him when he joined them, as if surprised to see him, and Johnny draped himself over his shoulders to make up for his rudeness.

“Johnny,” Peter said, and then cocked his head at the ambassador. “I assume you know Liz’allen’anor.”

Johnny stretched his lips in a smile, and Liz’allen met him with the same. “Oh yes,” she said. “The little brother of Senator Storm.”

 _Not so little,_ Johnny thought, but wouldn’t say.

“Not _so_ little,” Peter said, just this side of smug.

Johnny didn’t even have to fake his blush and gasp. “Babe.”

Peter winked at him.

Liz’allen had turned a slightly darker golden than her normal color. “Ah,” she said, “you are his—date?”

Peter nodded, his lips still curled into his conspiratorial smirk. “They don’t usually let types like me into places like this.”

“I see,” said Liz’allen, noticeably cooler. She raised her glass politely. “I hope you enjoy your first Senatorial Gala.”

“Thank you,” said Peter, and watched her go.

“I hope you enjoy your last,” Johnny said darkly.

Peter pulled back from him a little, but not far, raising his eyebrows. “I thought she seemed nice.”

“Sure, she was nice to _you,_ ” said Johnny. “Look at you.”

Peter did, glancing down at himself. “It’s the cape, huh?”

Johnny nodded. It wasn’t, but it didn’t hurt. “Girls love a half-cape,” he said. “Shows you’re not compensating for anything.”

He stole Peter’s drink and downed half of it, and Peter seemed happy enough to let him. “Some third date, huh?” he joked.

Johnny fought not to smile at the echo of his earlier thoughts. “Shut up,” he said.

“Is this a typical escalation for you?” Peter asked, his palm sliding across Johnny’s back to curl around his hip. “First drinks where no one actually drinks, then spying on an evil wizard, then a big fancy gala heist?”

Johnny slid a hand across his chest, still watching the ambassador absently. “You knew what you were getting into when you accepted this mission,” he murmured.

He felt Peter brush his nose into his temple, and then, just barely breathed against his ear, “No, I really didn’t.”

Johnny buried his face in his drink so he wouldn’t have to respond to that, and heard, faintly, a blip from Peter’s collar communicator, and then his own.

Without ceremony, Peter stepped behind the waiter, pressed a button to open the door of what was presumably some sort of closet, and shoved Johnny into it.

“Hey—" Johnny protested, but Peter stepped through the door after him, crowding him back against the shelves, and Johnny swallowed the rest of his sentence.

It was dim in the cramped space, but there was enough light for Johnny to see when Peter started undoing the top fastening of his shirt, and his mouth went dry. “H-hey,” he tried again, quieter, horrified to find he didn't actually want to stop this from happening, would, in fact—his eyes drawn to the curve of Peter's throat—very much like it to keep happening, in any other moment than this.  

Peter met his eyes, his face so close, dipping his fingers beneath his shirt. “Sorry,” he hissed. “Needed the quiet or we’d never be able to hear them.

Johnny blinked at him. Hear who—

Peter brought out the tiny cylindrical device he’d shown Johnny and Reed before, holding it out between them, and pressed a button on the side. Voices—tinny but clear—came through it, and Johnny pulled himself out of his dizzying spiral of disappointment and relief in order to listen.

 _“Your entire plan hinges on this, Richards?”_ asked Victor, his deep voice crackling through the tiny bug cupped in Peter’s palms. “ _You have no back-up, no army to force me, you are just here, asking me?”_

“That’s what _I_ said,” Johnny hissed. “This is never going to work.”

Peter raised his eyes, meeting Johnny’s. There was determination in his eyes, and for the first time Johnny got the sense that Peter really cared about this, that the fun they’d been having was in service of something personally, not just strategically, important to him.

Reed, through the bug, said, “ _yes.”_

 _“Foolish,”_ said Victor, _“to take such a risk.”_

Johnny closed his eyes.

“... _Very well.”_

Johnny opened his eyes. Peter was looking as surprised as he felt.

“ _You may take it. I tire of being treated like a pawn, and I enjoy this show of defiance. I'm no fan of the Senate, as you know, but if there should be one person ruling the galaxy,”_ there was a pause where Johnny could almost see Victor’s sardonic, knife-sharp smile, “ _it should not be Norman Osborne.”_

 _“Victor,”_ said Reed, “ _thank—"_

 _“On one condition,”_ Victor cut in smoothly. Johnny winced, and Peter frowned. _“Do not disappear.”_

Johnny shook his head. “This is a bad idea,” he muttered.

 _“I have to,”_ Reed explained. “ _There’s no way Osborne won’t find out about my involvement, I have to get my family away from here—"_

Victor must have made some gesture, because he cut himself off.

_“I don't mean from the Senate, or the engineering corps. Of course you must go. I mean: do not disappear from me. Give me some way to contact you, leave me some open line.”_

“This is a very, very bad idea,” Johnny hissed. Reed wouldn’t say no. Reed couldn’t say no—Victor absolutely meant it that this was the only way he’d agree, he didn’t doubt that—but more, he _wouldn’t_ say no. The ties between him and Victor were too old, too intense, too weird.

 _“Why?”_ asked Reed.

 _“Because,”_ said Victor, and then, for maybe the first time ever, Johnny heard him pause for words, as if choosing them carefully. “ _I may have need of you.”_

Reed was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “ _O_ _r I of you. Done.”_

Peter pressed the button on the cylinder again, dropping it back into whatever hidden pocket was beneath his shirt. “Showtime.” He started to close his collar, and then seemed to think better of it, re-undoing it again.

Johnny blinked at him. “What are you doing?”

“Like sixteen people just saw me shove you into a closet, and their imaginations are going wild,” Peter said. “If we go out there looking pristine and driven, they’re gonna be suspicious.” He winked. “Not to mention disappointed.”

 _I hate you,_ Johnny almost said, and then Peter shoved his hands into his hair and he did say it, “I _hate_ you,” fighting him off, vainly trying to restore his curls to any kind of order.

Peter laughed softly. “Welcome to the club, pretty boy.” He caught one of Johnny’s fussing hands and pulled him out into the Gala.

The Gala, which, improbably, was still going on without them, unperturbed by secret plots or worrying pacts or infuriatingly handsome rebels.

“C’mon,” said Peter. “Dance with me.”

Johnny stared at him, at the whirling people behind him. “You—you’re kidding.”

Peter’s eyebrows rose. “No, I’m not.”

“But—Peter.” Johnny took his hand, using it to pull him in so he could speak in a low voice. “The drop is _about_ to go down, we can’t just—”

Peter wrapped a long-fingered hand around the back of his neck, his face only inches from Johnny’s. “You mean the drop that’s happening off the stage, which is currently all the way across the dance floor from us?”

Johnny swallowed. “Oh,” he said.

“The dance floor that we’re going to have to cross, subtly, somehow, in order to make sure we intercept the drop when it happens?” Peter continued, his fingertips brushing the shell of Johnny’s ear.

“Yes, alright,” Johnny said, annoyed, fighting the urge to blush and to fight him off simultaneously. “I get it.”

Peter moved, gliding backwards, drawing him onto the dancefloor, their hands fumbling to find one another. Neither of them breaking their eye contact for probably too long. Johnny swallowed again, wishing he’d grabbed another drink despite needing to be sharp for this—his throat was _so_ dry. “Do you even know how to dance?” he asked, though it felt kind of rhetorical as Peter threaded them seamlessly into the swirling mass of people and clothes and beings where Johnny wasn’t sure where the _people_ part ended and the _clothes_ part began.

Peter grinned wide. “Nope,” he said, and immediately kicked Johnny in the foot.

It was something of a marvel, Johnny felt later, or even while it was happening: some small shard of his brain not immersed in the paralyzing combination of flustered nerves and absolute mortification was aware of the unlikeliness of _any_ of this. Peter wasn’t lying. He clearly didn’t know how to dance, or at least didn’t know the regimented, courtly dances of the Republic gala. But all of his missteps, all of his awkward fumbles, were contained perfectly to a bubble surrounding himself and Johnny—he never once trod on the Mon Calamari Ambassador’s dress, for example, despite the fact that they spend half the time right next to him and the thing fell to the floor in about eight tiers of aquamarine waves.

Also, every time Peter stumbled he managed to brush his cheek against Johnny’s, or laughed softly into the shared air between them, and it was making it very, very hard to concentrate.

They made it to the opposite side of the dance floor without incident, just as Reed—looking suspiciously flushed—came out of the door next to the stage, walking unhurriedly. He stopped a waiter droid, taking its tray of drinks, and made his way to the edge of the floor, as if waiting to offer them a drink as they came off it. Johnny saw Peter see him, and expected their dance to be at an end, but instead Peter waited for the perfect swelling of music, the peak of the strains of Mandalorian violin, and then he dipped Johnny.

Time slowed. It was clumsy—Johnny didn’t expect it, for one thing, so it took him a second to catch on and bend rather than just having Peter shove into him—and he was almost too late to catch the other thing that was happening, which was Reed dropping the tray of drinks with an exaggerated “woah!” and amongst the scattering liquor and shattering glass a thin, metallic tube, falling right—Johnny let his hands fall backward, swooning dramatically against the ever-strong bar of Peter’s arm—into Johnny’s palm.

Johnny straightened back in an instant, his hands against Peter’s chest, tucking the tube between the cloth and his skin through the place he’d left his shirt open from their earlier supposed canoodling, and Peter caught his chin, holding his eyes. “Flawless,” he murmured, almost against his mouth, and then the dance was over.

Peter straightened up, and Johnny automatically did the same, his heart pounding so loud in his ears he had no idea if the music had struck up again or not. His hand was still in Peter’s grasp, and he bent over it, pressing his lips to it in an echo—perhaps a bookend—of that first kiss to his knuckles outside the labs when all of this began.

+

Peter slid the tube into the travelling case, making sure it was safe from being jostled. If Reed was right, it was a kind of gas—what it _did_ was still up for discussion, but Peter was willing to bet it wasn’t something he wanted to let off by accident in the guest apartments the night before he was free of this overcomplicated, frankly heartbreaking job was over.

He’d taken off his Gala cape already, but he stripped off his shirt as well, left the case on the table, and went to sit on his bed and just. Stare. And there he stayed, staring, until there was a knock at his door.

He’d barely opened it before Johnny’s hands were in his hair and his lips were at his throat. His mouth was _exactly_ as soft as it looked and, god, “Johnny—”

“Shh,” said Johnny against his jaw. “Just—shut up, please.” He ran his hands down Peter’s sides, his mouth shifting down his chest. “Let me do this.”

There was want in his voice, but something else made Peter catch his jaw, tilting his face up so he could see it properly. Johnny had his lip between his teeth, his blue eyes dark but unfocused. He’d lost his terrible jacket somewhere and was just in the tight navy undershirt beneath, and he was absolutely gorgeous, and he was very, very drunk.

“Don’t tell me this isn’t what you want,” Johnny breathed, halfway to his knees.

“Johnny,” said Peter, pained; tried to come up with a lie but so caught in a web of larger ones that the small truths just slipped right through. “I literally thought about this the first night I was here, but—”

Johnny made a small whining noise and turned his face so he could close his lips around Peter’s thumb.

Peter took a steadying breath, and with herculean effort pulled away. “We’re not doing this.”

Johnny pushed himself to his feet. “Why?” he demanded. “You’re leaving tomorrow. This is it, you want me, I want you, it’s been obvious for weeks. Let me, let yourself _have_ this. It won’t _matter_ beyond right now.”

 _That’s why,_ Peter almost said, but he’d have to explain that. Have to explain why the thought of fucking Johnny and then leaving him here to fates unknown was suddenly unbearable, and he couldn’t, not without telling him the whole truth. Not without telling him how the plan had changed. “You’re drunk,” he said instead.

Johnny swayed, catching himself on the doorway. “I take it back,” he said bitterly. “You are an asshole.”

Peter sat down on the edge of his bed with a sigh. “I knew you’d come around.”

Johnny was blinking rapidly, as if he were trying not to cry, and Peter bit his lip. “Hey,” he said. “C’mere.”

“No,” said Johnny. “Kriff off.” He swiped a hand over his face but didn’t move.

“Please,” said Peter. “Just. This bed is too big for me. We can’t—it’s—” He sighed, explosive, hating every second of this, of what this was and what this wasn’t. “You can sleep here, if you want. Just sleep.”

Johnny crossed to him—well, not to him, but to the bed beside him, collapsing onto it and curling up with his back toward Peter. He was _radiating_ misery, and Peter had no idea what to do with his hands.

After a while of silence except for Johnny’s harsh breathing, he got up and turned off the light.

He doubted he would sleep much, and he didn’t really try, just settling down cross-legged at Johnny’s back, trying not to hate himself for refusing him or for how much he really, really wished he hadn’t.

“Hey,” said Peter into the dark. “Johnny.”

Johnny made a soft, sleepy sound, and Peter stared down at him, trying to pick out his shape in the darkness. “What did you mean, last night? When you said no one needs you?”

“S’obvious,” Johnny said. “Right? I’m just—Senator Storm’s little brother, a—a hanger-on. A know-nothing socialite, like Crystal, or Pietro, or the rest of those empty-headed nobility still drinking and smoking in overpriced bars right now who will—will wake up to a world they don’t understand anymore.”

Peter didn’t know who Crystal or Pietro were, but the rest of it was so clearly wrong it stuck under his skin. “You’ve got a family,” he said. “An amazing family. And you and that family, you’ve done something amazing tonight, you have to know that.”

Johnny burrowed his face into Peter’s bed with a distressed sound. “ _You_ and my family did something amazing.”

“ _No_ ,” Peter said, insistent. He chose his next words carefully. Johnny was drunk, would maybe not even remember this, but he had to say it, and he had to say it right. “I came here with an agenda,” he said. “I came here as—as that exact asshole you expected, someone to have a miserable time and do a miserable job and then go back home and keep living a miserable life. You—” he took a breath. “You completely changed how I saw not only this job, but the future. My future, the galaxy’s future. You taught me to think big when I’d only thought small, to really interrogate the reasons I fight for what I fight for.” He licked his lips, lowered his voice. “And you don’t know it yet, but you’ve completely changed how tomorrow will go.”

Johnny said nothing. Peter, hesitating, reached out and touched his shoulder. He was so warm, warm through the undershirt, and at Peter’s touch he rolled toward him, grabbing his hand and pressing a fierce kiss to his knuckles, wordless and grateful and clearly barely on the edge of consciousness.

Peter smiled down at him, something delicate and wondering and new living just under his tongue. “Goodnight, Johnny.”

Johnny just breathed deep against his skin.

+

Johnny woke up once, unbelievably comfortable, his cheek pressed to warm skin. There was something hovering in his awareness, some reason this shouldn’t be so comfortable and so right, but he kicked it away and pulled himself stubbornly back into sleep.

When he woke again he was alone in Sue’s guest apartments, his head pounding. The case containing the weapon was gone. There was a bottle of champagne on the table, and some sort of—wrapped present. Johnny rubbed his eyes. None of Peter’s things were here. He knew he was going to leave today, but kriffing off without saying goodbye—

The doors to the guest quarters _shunked_ open. In the doorway was Sue, her face pale with horror. Next to her was a redheaded woman Johnny didn’t recognize, and a brunet man that—with a meteoric sinking of heart—he absolutely did.

“Johnny,” said Sue. “This is Jean Grey, and—”

“Drake,” Johnny interrupted. “The actual Robert Drake.”

Drake—so clearly himself, so obviously, devastatingly different than Peter Par Ker, gave him a nod.

Johnny looked back at Sue. “I’m going to kill him,” he said. “I’m going to kill him _slowly,_ I don’t care how strong he is—”

“He is really strong,” muttered Drake, rubbing his jaw. “Knocked me out and stranded me in orbit. If I hadn’t had a way to contact Jean I might’ve been stuck up there til I starved to death.” He smiled slightly at Johnny. “If you kill him, I’d like to a get a few shots in first.”

“We’ll have to find him before anyone can get any shots in,” Jean said grimly. “He’s not making it easy.” She crossed to Johnny, looking closely at his face. “You’re in pain. Did he hurt you?”

“No,” said Johnny quickly. “No, it’s—I drank. Last night. He never did anything to me.”

She was still looking at him, green eyes too knowing. “Did he tell you anything about where he might be going?”

“No,” said Johnny, rubbing his face. “Wait—yes, he said he was from Nar Shadaa. Hutt-operated city planet, Outer Rim.”

“He won’t have gotten that far overnight,” Sue said.

Jean shook her head. “I don’t think he’s gone that far at all,” she said. “There’s a Hutt lieutenant in the area, we’ve been monitoring her activities for a few days now.” She crossed to the table, laying a data pad next to the champagne, and an image of a stunningly beautiful Cathar woman rose from it in blue light. “Fel’icia Hardy,” Jean said quietly. “Gang leader in her own right.” She looked at Sue, face serious. “Recently seen in talks with operatives working for Osborne.”

Johnny looked at Sue. “Has there been any movement from Osborne’s people since we took the weapon?”

Sue shook her head, the worry line between her eyes deepening.

Johnny nodded. “Maybe they’re not surprised that it’s gone,” he said bitterly, “because they already know they’re going to get it back.”

Robert crossed his arms, staring at the hologram of the Cathar. “And we have no idea where they might be doing this rendezvous.”

Johnny had a thought, and dug in his pocket. “Actually,” he said, holding up the small cylindrical receiver he’d stolen from Peter’s shirt in exchange for the weapon—at the time, innocently hoping to reverse engineer it, or give it as a gift to Reed. “I think we might.” He looked to Sue. “Reed gave that little bug back to him, right?”

Sue smiled at him, slow as sunrise. “Call your people,” she said to Jean. “We know where he is.”

+

Peter perched uneasily in the cockpit of his borrowed ship. He shouldn’t have taken this call. He should have hung up five seconds in when he realized it wasn’t Fel’icia. He should have—

“You’re were _using_ me,” Johnny accused. “I can’t believe this. The whole set-up—showing off for me in the speeder shop, the whole sob story—never having been to a holovid—it was just to get me to take you to the Gala so you can do this stupid job—”

“Hey,” objected Peter, “hey, pal, right back at you, okay? You needed a date to this thing, you needed him strong and a stranger and you needed him on short notice. You’re really trying to tell me you were loitering around the speeder-shop half-naked by _coincidence—_ ”

“I wasn’t looking for _you,_ ” Johnny snapped. “I wasn’t—lying in wait for you, I wasn’t setting a trap, some kind of—of honey pot—”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Peter shot back. “You’re saying if this Bobby Drake _had_ shown up and found you all shirtless and covered in oil that wouldn’t have gotten you exactly where you needed to be—”

“Look, just because you don’t know the difference between being casually attractive and lying in wait to seduce and use someone doesn’t mean I don’t,” Johnny said bitterly.

“I don’t get it,” Peter said. “You knew going in the whole thing was bogus. We both did. It would’ve been just as bogus with someone else.”

Johnny glared at him, his eyes somehow even bluer than the rest of the hologram around him. “You were supposed to be lying to everyone else,” he said fiercely. “Not to me.”

Peter ran a hand into his hair, sighing. “Would it help if I told you I didn’t have any fun?”

Johnny’s lips and eyebrows worked in the same twitching, angry curve. “Why would that _help—"_

“Good, because it wouldn’t be true,” Peter said, feeling himself smile despite himself. “I’d dance with you for nefarious purposes anytime.”

Johnny closed his mouth with a snap, his eyes flickering off Peter’s face and his chin dropping. For the first time Peter wished these stupid holograms showed color—was he blushing? He was willing to bet he was, he blushed easily. He had a sudden unbidden flash of Johnny spread out beneath him, his face turned away, his lip between his teeth, a delicate pink spreading down his bare chest—

He coughed. “So, uh, no hard feelings,” he said, and then winced at the accidental pun. “I'll, uh, see you around?”

Johnny hung up on him.

“Okay,” Peter muttered, “I deserved that.”

“What did you deserve?”

Peter yelped, straightening up. Johnny’s beautiful angry face had been replaced with Fel’icia’s, built of the same blue lines, but she was looking directly at him, almost through him.

“Uh,” said Peter, adjusting the crotch of his pants. “Nothing, hi.”

She raised a suspicious eyebrow at him. “Your comms channel was open, I assumed you were beginning the rendezvous.”

“I,” said Peter, and then focused. He’d thought about this, he had a plan _. Get your head on straight, Par Ker._ “Fel’icia,” he said, “how sure are you of these allies of yours?”

Fel’icia scowled at him. “What do you mean?”

“It, uh, the job was weird,” he said. “Not exactly the ruthless terrorist collaborators I was expecting. They seemed to think they were working with a rebel cell, and the research I was able to do in my downtime seemed to confirm that. It’s possible you were being lied to, I’m not saying you knew—”

His ship jolted, the distinctive weight-from-weightlessness stomach-drop of being caught in a tractor beam, and he looked up from transferring her some of his research to meet a gaze gone steely. “Or,” he said quietly, “maybe I am.”

Fel’icia broke eye contact first. “Get him down here,” she said to someone offscreen, and the hologram snapped out.

The tractor beam pulled him in not to a ship but to what looked like an old mining facility on a nearby asteroid, and as soon as Peter had stepped off his ship he was surrounded by ugly Hutt toughs and hustled out of the facility onto the surface of the asteroid itself. The whole place had artificial gravity, artificial air, but seemed to be completely abandoned; the perfect place for a dramatic showdown, a whole world for this picture-perfect betrayal.

There were more enforcers at Fel’icia’s back, but she was clearly in charge, standing tall and beautiful and ruthless at the front of an army. Behind her, past the troops, was a sleek spaceship Peter didn’t recognize.

“Fel,” Peter said slowly. “What is this?”

“Sorry, lover,” said Fel’icia. “But there’s a new world order on the horizon, and I don’t intend to be shuffled back down to the bottom.”

“You don’t mean this,” Peter said. “You—you were doing this for the greater good, we were trying to _help_ people.”

Fel'icia was smiling, but it was hollow. “That’s your problem, you know. You always want people to be better than they really are.” She ran a thumb over the bare strip of skin at her throat. “If you’d thought it through, you would have known this is the only way this was going to end.”

Peter’s own words came back to him, staring at the collection of people surrounding Fel'icia. _They want you to think of money as power, and to use that power only for yourself._

“This is a mistake,” he said. “Fel, you don’t know what you’re getting in to. The guy who made this shit, he’s not going to just let this go. I saw him, I know him, I’ve seen him on Nar Shadaa. This is deeper than you think—”

“Oh, Peter,” said Fel’icia. “You still don’t get it, do you? I didn’t get you to steal Osborne’s weapon so I could use it against him. I got you to steal it so I could give it back.”

Behind her, the sleek ship opened, steam hissing and a long ramp extending from its base. Black boots descended it—one pair, and then another; the first figure was in a long black cloak, its hood down now, and Norman Osborne surveyed the assembled masses before him. The second figure Peter didn’t recognize; he was cloaked in green, rather than black, and Peter thought he glimpsed armor or maybe cybernetics beneath the fabric.

“You have the weapon?” Osborne asked, his voice carrying easily, almost unnaturally across

The two enforcers patted Peter down until they found the case he’d stashed in his boot.

“Hey, Fel,” he said, “if you’re gonna get handsy, at least do it yourself.”

She didn’t smile.

“So,” he said. “Now what?”

“Osborne!”

The voice came from behind him. He--and half the troops surrounding Fel'icia--turned to look.

Senator Susan Storm was striding over the dusty plain of the asteroid, her blue and white cape billowing behind her. At her side, Peter saw Reed and the rocky hulk of Ben, and on the other was Johnny, and—Bobby Drake.

Peter narrowed his eyes. That explained the people behind Sue, though; a riot of people of all colors and shapes, aliens that Peter recognized and others he had no words for. At their head, forming a triangle behind the fore-triangle of Sue and her family, was a tall Abyssinian with a complicated helmet covering his single eye completely; cut into it was an x-shaped visor of scarlet glass.

Peter saw Johnny notice him and immediately draw the blaster at his side. He yelped, holding up his hands, but Johnny fired past him, once, twice, beautifully precise, taking out both of the enforcers to either side of him before Peter could stop wondering if he knew how to fire the thing.

Fel’icia let out a scream of rage and threw herself—not at Johnny, as Peter feared, but at _him,_ tackling him to the ground and wrapping her arms around him fast enough that she got her razor-sharp claws at his throat before he could get the leverage to throw her off.

He was stronger that her. Barely. But she was much, much faster.

Johnny broke off from the rest of his group, approaching, blaster wavering, eyes unsure.

“She won’t hurt me,” Peter said, holding his hands up.

“How sure of that are you?” Johnny demanded, and then, “and why should I help you anyway?”

“Very sure,” said Peter, and swallowed. “Well. Kind of sure. Less sure by the second. And. Because we're friends?”

Johnny’s face twisted. Fel'icia laughed in Peter’s ear, low and harsh. “Looks like you did your job a little too well, lover.”

“Shut up,” snapped Peter, hating the way the whole line of Johnny’s body tensed further at the word. “And what were you planning if I hadn’t? What if he'd just shot me?”

Fel'icia snorted. “You would have been fine, his blaster’s set to stun.”

It was a classic trick—get the guy with the blaster trained on you to check, so you can grab it from him or run or throw your captive at him, and Peter opened his mouth to tell Johnny not to fall for it when he realized he hadn’t moved, hadn’t even reacted. Peter glanced at the bodies around them, looked closer. It was easily lost in the chaos, but he could see the slight motions of their breathing.

The rocky field, while littered with the fallen, didn’t _feel_ like a place of death. Peter knew the feeling of death, of violent death; it had clung to him like an oily film over his skin for years after his uncle was killed. Drake and his rebels, Sue and Reed, even what Peter could see at a glance of their walking mountain, were stunning, knocking out, and otherwise incapacitating the worst scum of the criminal galaxy, leaving them all alive.

 _Oh._ Peter looked back at Johnny, at his blue eyes blazing with defiance and anger and just a little bit of embarrassment, and a fist that had curled tight around Peter’s heart years before loosened, warmth spreading through his chest. _Oh._

“Let him go,” Johnny gritted out. “Can’t you see you've lost? You don't need him anymore.”

Peter looked past him, and with a shock realized he was right. The green-cloaked figure was nowhere to be seen, and Sue and Ben and the X-helmeted Abyssian had Osborne backing into his ship, the remaining enforcers shooting blaster fire at the three of them that, impossibly, fizzed and sparked off a shield of nothingness. He filed that away with a few other impossibilities and focused on what was important: A victory in this skirmish, at least. He forced his eyes back to Johnny and the subject at hand.

“Maybe not,” Fel'icia acknowledged. “Maybe I just want him.” Her claws pricked at the line of Peter’s collarbone, so sharp that he knew even that small touch drew blood. “I get the feeling you can relate.”

Johnny’s fingers twitched on the blaster. “I don’t care what you want,” he snapped, fury keeping his voice steady where his hands were not. “Or what you think, either of you.”

“Very reasonable,” said Peter, and tried to flip Fel’icia over his shoulder onto her back.

She twisted in the air, landing on all fours; Peter swung a kick at her side, and she backflipped out of the way of that, coming up snarling, her long claws glinting in the light of blaster-fire.

Johnny shot her in the head.

She dropped, stunned just like the rest, and Peter crossed to her, leaning down to make sure she was breathing. By the time he straightened up, Johnny was gone.

He cracked his neck and threw himself into the fray, cracking heads with a kind of reckless abandon that felt like was releasing  _years_ of frustration.

Cleanup didn’t take long. Osborne's sleek ship was gone, the green-cloaked stranger with it. They just left the passed out enemy combatants on the battlefield, and drifted as a bedraggled force back behind the mining facility headquarters where the Denusians’ ship waited. Peter drifted with them, following Ben as he carried a few knocked out members of the the terrorists— _rebels,_ he corrected himself—and his hunch served him well. He found Johnny just inside the ship, talking to the man with the X-shaped visor.

“Is this is, Cyclops?” Johnny was asking. “We just—you know, we crossed blasters with a guy about to pull off a probably-successful coup to control the galaxy. Does that make this war?”

Cyclops hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said. His voice was surprisingly nice, a pleasant baritone. “Not yet. But if we are, I’d be glad to have a guy who can shoot like you on my side.”

Johnny grinned at him. “And you haven’t even seen me fly.”

Cyclops smiled back at him, and then straightened up, his head cocked like he was listened to something. “Please excuse me.”

“Uh, sure,” Johnny said, and shook his hand. Cyclops wandered off, and Johnny watched him go, looking kind of lost.

“He’s right, you know,” said Peter. “You’re a _really_ good shot.”

Johnny didn’t look at him.

“It was pretty hot, honestly,” Peter admitted.

He expected Johnny to roll his eyes at him, or smile his little curled smile that Peter had let himself believe was because he thought Peter was charming despite himself. But when Johnny met his eyes his face was stony. “Stop,” he said, and spun on his heel.

“Hey,” Peter objected. He started to move after him, but something made him pause. There was motion, behind him, on the edge of his awareness, and then a massive, stony hand descended on his shoulder. Peter turned, startled, to come face to—well, sort of face with giant, rocky Ben.

“I’d back off,” he said. “If I was you.”

“I—I  wasn’t really lying,” Peter said logically. “I really did think I was delivering the stuff to the rebellion, just not the part of the rebellion that _you_ thought I was.”

The thing—Ben, Johnny had called him—shoved Peter against the wall as effortlessly as breathing. He leaned in, rumbling, his small eyes further narrowed in suspicion and anger, and then he said, “Johnny almost had kids.”

Peter—pinned like a butterfly—blinked at him, breathless for more reasons than the giant hand crushing his lungs. “Wh-what?”

“He almost had kids,” Ben continued, “with a woman, a shapechanger who was pretending to be my ex, and seduced him under false pretenses in order to have those kids. For years she was pretendin’.” He eased up the pressure on Peter’s chest at least enough that his ribs didn’t creak when he breathed. “Kid’s got a thing about bein’ lied to.”

“Oh,” said Peter, trying to fit any of that into the picture he had of Johnny. He’d always struck Peter as—carefree.  Troubled by the current political situation, sure, who wasn’t, especially when it was so close at hand, but otherwise, well, a fly-boy. An honestly intoxicating combination of sweet and reckless. A hotshot pilot with his head in the solar clouds who shot ruthless crime lords with his blaster on stun. ‘Caring about the things that matter’ _,_ but not really, not in a way Peter had believed. He suddenly felt a massive, hideous weight of guilt, not just for the lying to Johnny but for so thoroughly _misunderstanding_ him. “Kriff, I—I had no idea.”

“I know,” said Ben, and let him go. “Don't be too hard on yourself, he avoids talkin’ about it like the plague.”

Peter slid to the floor, his legs weak and trembling. “Sorry, you just nearly broke all of my ribs and now you're telling me not to be hard on myself?”

There was a bright spot in the crystalline structure of Ben’s eyes, and Peter swore it was twinkling at him. “Exactly,” he said. “Bein’ hard on you’s my job.”

He found Johnny tucked away in a mostly-empty cargo bay, sitting on a bale of something probably-stolen. Peter drifted up to him, hands in his pockets. “Are you gonna take him up on it?”

For a second Peter thought Johnny would just refuse to speak to him at all, but that initial impression he had of bright, fast burning anger had been right, even if so many other things he’d assumed about Johnny had been wrong. Johnny’s shoulders slumped; the defeat in his posture hurting Peter even if it meant he got what he wanted. “What?” he asked, his voice as weary as the line of his body.

“Cyclops,” Peter asked. “Are you gonna go with him, be an honest-to-goodness rebel?”

Johnny leaned his head back. “I don’t know,” he admitted, and then quieter, “I’d get to fly.”

Peter’s lips twitched in a small, unstoppable smile, knowing Johnny wouldn’t see it and not caring. “Yeah.”

“Surprised you’re not headed back to Nar Shadaa already,” Johnny said, still staring upward at the domed ceiling of the rebel’s ship. “If that’s even where you’re actually from. Or are you waiting around to see if you can make off with the weapon after all, sell it to the highest bidder this time?”

“That’d be a little difficult,” Peter said dryly, “considering I left it back in the guest rooms on Coruscant.”

“Peter,” Sue called from the doorway. She was carrying the case for the prototype in one hand, her face quizzical. “Are you aware that this is empty?”

“Well aware,” said Peter as she crossed to him. “That’s what we in the biz like to call a fake-out, ma’am.”

Both Storm siblings stared at him, faces demanding explanation.

He took a breath. “So,” he said. “When Fel’icia hired me for this job, she told me it was for the greater good, that Drake and Cyclops were terrorists out to get the weapon for themselves, and that you guys were in league with them. That if I snuck in and replaced Drake, I’d be delivering the weapon into the hands of the real good guys, the guys working with Fel.” He shook his head. “About five minutes into meeting you all, it was clear that almost none of that could be true.”

Johnny raised his eyebrows. “Why?” he asked.

“You’re too capital-G Good to work with terrorists,” Peter told him, and then turned to Sue, “and you and Reed are _way_ too smart to be tricked into doing so.”

“Hey,” said Johnny, but his tone was mild.

“So I figured—you were the good guys, Fel was being duped. So I left the real thing with Johnny in your guest rooms back on Coruscant so you could go through with your original plan once poor Bobby Drake got out of the orbit I trapped him in, and I could figure out what was going on with Fel’icia.” He smiled, a little sad. “Turns out she was too smart, too, but maybe a little less capital G than I thought.”

Sue shook her head and put a hand to her comm. “Jean? Can you get someone to long-range Coruscant? I need to speak with N’Mor immediately.” She stalked off, still talking.

Peter raised his eyebrows at Johnny. “N’Mor has access to your sister’s rooms? You’re _sure_ they didn’t all sleep together?”

Johnny was glaring at him. “I can probably list on one hand the things I’m sure of,” he said. “Why didn’t you _tell_ me?

“I did tell you,” Peter insisted. “I left you a present, didn’t you see?”

“Oh,” said Johnny, taken aback. His cheeks pinked. “I didn’t open it, I was too mad at you.”

Peter snorted, his lips curling. “Of course you were.” He rubbed his neck. “I hope you at least enjoyed the champagne.”

Johnny winced. “I, uh, may have thrown it across the room.”

Peter stared at him. “I was saving that,” he said plaintively. “For years, I spent a week’s worth of prize money on that.”

Johnny made a face. “Uh, sorry?” he said, and then his eyebrows snapped together. “Wait, hang on, _kriff_ that, there’s no way in hell I should be apologizing before _you_ have for all the shit you lied to me about—for stealing poor Bobby’s identity, for leading me on—”

Peter caught his wildly-gesticulating hand. “Hey,” he said quietly, and Johnny stopped, though his face said that Peter touching him was an experience with a fast-approaching expiration date. “I’m sorry. I really am. I messed up. I just thought I was doing a job, and as soon as I got in too deep and realized what was happening I should have come clean.”

“Yeah,” said Johnny, but the warning in his face had eased, a little, and his fingers weren’t so tense in Peter’s. “You absolutely should have.”

“For what it’s worth,” Peter said, _and it might very well be nothing,_ “I didn’t lie to you except about who I was and what I was doing.” He winced. “Which. Sounds like a lot, when I say it like that. But I just mean like—that I was Bobby, and that I worked for the Denusians. Everything else, everything I said about my home and my family and the people who need me, everything I said about how I felt—that was all true.”

Johnny’s eyes shifted over his face, restless, but Peter found he preferred that a thousand times to Johnny not looking at him. “You know it’s going to take a while for me to be able to believe you about much of anything.”

Peter licked his lips and tried not to be too hopeful when he asked, “so you wouldn’t mind if I happened to stick around for a while to help make that happen?” He paused. “After I go get Aunt May. And. Maybe some local kids. And possibly this guy I know who’s got a really terrible dad. And I’ll need a place to live that isn’t that tiny ship—Fel'icia essentially kind of ruined my life.” He swallowed. “I guess what I’m saying is. If I wanted to come back. Once I figure out how to un-ruin my life. Would that be cool?”

Johnny’s eyes were softer than Peter had seen them in days, and it kind of really made him want to kiss him, which was a problem when they were in the middle of this knife’s edge of a conversation. “If you mean back to the X-Men, I don’t think that’s a question for me.”

Peter raised the hand not still tangled with his to touch his jaw. “That’s not what I mean,” he said.

Johnny took a breath, and let it out slowly. “I think you actually coming back would go a long way toward things being cool, yeah.”

His thumb was brushing over Peter’s knuckles and Peter let that draw him forward, into Johnny’s space, let himself cup Johnny’s cheek, run his thumb across his cheekbone. Johnny’s eyelids fluttered but didn’t close, his lips parting.

Peter swallowed hard. “Can I—”

Johnny didn’t let him finish the sentence, his mouth soft and desperate and so warm, and Peter’s chest was filled with nothing but heart, his relief or the sweep of Johnny’s tongue or both absolutely dizzying. He clung and Johnny clung, the distance his lies had always kept between them collapsing, replaced by a new distance that in this moment at least they were both desperate to cross. A moment more and Peter would walk away, and a moment more and Johnny would let him, but right now they were promising something both of them were too smart to put into words: that from now on the fabric of space between them was elastic, that this first kiss would not be the last.

Johnny broke first, taking a great, gasping breath of air, his hand fisted hard in Peter’s shirt. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“Okay,” said Peter, and Johnny let him go.

**Author's Note:**

> hope everyone enjoyed all the campaign podcast references up in here bc I sure enjoyed putting 'em in


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